


Long Ride Ahead

by saellys



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Everyone Lives/Nobody Dies, Childhood Friends, Coming of Age, Everybody Lives, Found Family Feels, Gen, Pre-Movie(s), Pre-OT3, Slow Burn, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-20
Updated: 2017-03-16
Packaged: 2018-09-18 17:19:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 23,203
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9395435
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saellys/pseuds/saellys
Summary: “I hide a lot in the orphanage too, and no one can find me there. It drives all the other Guardians mad, except Chirrut and Baze. They take me out in the city most afternoons so I won’t cause trouble at the temple. Chirrut’s going to teach me to slow my heartbeat and breathing, and then even he won’t be able to find me.”“Not true,” Chirrut sing-songs.Bodhi wants to ask which part of all that was not true, but what comes out instead is, “How do you hide so well if you never stop talking?”





	1. Hide and Seek

**Author's Note:**

> This fic owes a debt of inspiration to this fanart: http://luc-sw.tumblr.com/post/155415803098/i-just-wanted-to-see-space-dads-being-space-dads 
> 
> It's also heavily inspired by "The Last Poem of Jedha" by schweinsty, the ultimate Bodhi back story.
> 
> Content warning for mentions of canon childhood trauma.

Bodhi is eleven, and the girl who grabs his arm and pulls him into a crevice in a wall in the Middle District plaza is eight. She has bright, steady eyes and too-big front teeth, and she whispers, “I’m Jyn. Don’t make a sound. Imperials are coming.” 

Imperials are  _ not _ , and Bodhi is too old for hiding games. He opens his mouth to say so, but the girl glares, somehow conveying both affected urgency and total authority. Bodhi shuts his mouth. And then he covers it with his hand, because outside the crevice, in the plaza, his sister has just realized he’s not with her. 

“Bodhi? Bodhi!” 

Jyn’s hand tightens around Bodhi’s arm. His sister walks right past them. It’s dusty in the broken wall, but the stones soaked up the afternoon sun and there is warmth at his back. 

“Bodhi!” Her footsteps quicken. “Sirs, have you seen a little boy? Black hair, brown eyes, about this tall?” Which is to say, half the little boys in Jedha.

Something taps the wall nearby. Jyn draws a deep, silent breath, and gestures at her puffed cheeks. Bodhi copies her. 

“Not to worry, little sister,” says a deep voice. “We know where he is.” 

Jyn shuts her eyes tight, and Bodhi takes this opportunity to disobey orders and poke his head out. There are no Imperials of course, just his sister in the company of two Guardians wearing red and black. One has skin as dark as Bodhi’s, and the other is more compactly built, and almost as pale as Jyn. Both have shorn hair. 

Bodhi steps lightly out of the crevice and into their path. “Here I am.” 

His sister lets out a breath, and then levels an accusing finger at him. “You brat. You’re too old for that business. Wait until I tell Aba--” 

“It wasn’t my idea,” Bodhi protests, even as the smaller of the two men crouches by the crack where Jyn is still hiding. 

The Guardian grips his metal-capped stick, pokes it gently into the crack. “It’s safe,” he calls. 

“ _ He _ spoiled it,” Jyn says. 

“That’s the risk you take when you bring others into your games,” says the Guardian. He puts one hand into the crevice, and Jyn comes out holding it, and for a moment Bodhi is pinned between her glare and his sister’s. 

But his sister, at least, softens when she sees Jyn. “You made a friend?” she says to Bodhi, and he makes a face at her. “Is she from the orphanage?” The bigger Guardian inclines his head. 

“I was brought there when Imperials shot my mother,” Jyn announces. 

Bodhi and his sister exchange a glance. “I see,” his sister says carefully. “We were on our way home for tea and fringi. I’m sure my mother would be very grateful to you for finding Bodhi. Would you join us?” 

“I wasn’t lost,” Bodhi protests. His sister elbows him. 

The smaller Guardian tilts his head. “We ought to--”

“We accept,” says the bigger one, smiling broadly. At his partner’s stare (a sightless one, Bodhi notices now), he shrugs. “I love fringi.” 

On their way out of the Middle District, Jyn keeps pace with Bodhi even though his legs are much longer. “I know the best hiding spots in the city,” Jyn boasts. “And I can stay hidden for hours without a peep of noise. Chirrut always finds me, though. Except for the time he sat on me.” 

“That counted,” says the smaller Guardian. 

“I hide a lot in the orphanage too, and no one can find me there. It drives all the other Guardians mad, except Chirrut and Baze. They take me out in the city most afternoons so I won’t cause trouble at the temple. Chirrut’s going to teach me to slow my heartbeat and breathing, and then even he won’t be able to find me.”

“Not true,” Chirrut sing-songs. 

Bodhi wants to ask which part of all that was not true, but what comes out instead is, “How do you hide so well if you never stop talking?” 

The bigger Guardian snorts. 

Bodhi’s sister rounds on him. “She is our guest. Don’t be a disgrace.” 

After a sullen pause, Bodhi nods. 

Jyn does stop talking eventually, when Bodhi’s ami presses a little flat cake into her hands and sends her and Bodhi to the front stoop. Before she splits it, Jyn examines it in the setting sun, the play of light across the glazed surface, the orange dusting of ground veru. She smells it with her eyes closed, and then breaks it in two and offers half to Bodhi. 

His ami makes good fringi, good enough that Bodhi usually hates sharing it, but as he watches Jyn’s face he doesn’t so much mind sharing with someone who really appreciates it. 

She leans back against the doorframe when she’s eaten her half and licked her fingers. A weaver passes in the street, rugs rolled up on his back after a day in the marketplace. Above them the stars are coming out. It’s cold, but the fringi’s warmth lingers. 

“My mother believed in the Force,” Jyn says after a while. “That’s why I’m in the temple orphanage.” 

“Do you believe in it?” Bodhi asks her. It’s a poll he’s been surreptitiously conducting for a few months now, to gauge just how holy this city really is, and how much adolescent rebelliousness may be tolerated in the future. 

She has something in her hand--the pendant on her necklace, it looks like. “Probably,” she says. 

Bodhi understands her perfectly. Childlike faith is nothing more than repeating, with perfect conviction, what you’ve been told is true. After that comes a stage of being at peace with the possibility that it isn’t true, and after that comes Bodhi’s stage, where the idea of it not being true is objectively not okay because it shakes the foundations of his entire moral system and he has to start over with the inherent value of sentient life. 

He’s not sure what comes after that stage. Maybe joining the Guardians. 

There’s a deep laugh from inside the house, and Chirrut emerges first, taps the side of Jyn’s shoe with his stick. “Oh dear, was that you?” he says as Jyn huffs at him. 

The bigger Guardian--Baze--comes out after him. “Okay, little sister,” he says, squatting in front of the stoop. 

Jyn climbs onto his back and he stands with a grunt. “See you tomorrow, Bodhi,” Jyn calls as she moves down the twilit street. 

“Tomorrow?” he calls after her, but she’s halfway down the block and she probably takes it for confirmation. 

The next afternoon his sister answers the door and Jyn is there, as promised. Chirrut and Baze wait beyond her. “Can Bodhi come out and play?” 

His sister meets his bewildered gaze, and smiles serenely. “Absolutely.”


	2. Contemplanys I

Bodhi is twelve, and Jyn is nine, and her stories are preposterous. No one’s real life is that dramatic. “I have two fathers,” she confides as they walk.

He thought she had a mum at some point. “Like Baze and Chirrut?”

She frowns, drawing comparisons to which he isn’t privy. “No, they’re not married. Not to each other anyway. Papa was kidnapped by the Imperials, and he’s Force knows where now. And Saw, he’s the one who brought me here. He lives east of the city in a fortress guarded by stone Jedi. His People come to check on me sometimes. They bring money for the orphanage. Saw keeps a monster in his dungeon. It has a hundred tentacles and it can peel your mind like a vweliu nut.”

“You’re such a liar.”

Jyn gets in his personal space. “It’s called _Bor Gullet_.” Bodhi tries to dodge around her, but she’s too quick. She wriggles her fingers in his face. “What are you thinking?” she hisses.

If he pushes her, she’ll just escalate and within seconds they’ll be wrestling in the dust. As ever, he has to be the bigger person. “I’m thinking you’re a liar.”

Jyn gets distracted, a blessedly frequent occurrence. “Are those real?”

He follows her to a stall where dozens of crystal pendants hang, casting sunlight in all directions. “They’re… crystals,” Bodhi says diplomatically. For that price, they’re undoubtedly lab-grown, but it’s poor manners--and generally inadvisable--to disparage wares in front of the seller.

Jyn pulls her necklace up from her collar and compares the crystal there with the ones in the stall. Hers is bigger, which seems to please her. “Do you think your sister would like one?”

She might if it were real. Actually, she’d probably like almost anything Jyn likes. On nights when Jyn talks the Guardians into staying at the Rook home just a little past sundown, she usually trails Bodhi’s sister into her room to fiddle with the trinkets there, and presumably talk about girl things.

“I don’t have enough credits,” Bodhi lies.

“I’ll buy that necklace,” says the jewelry seller. She appraises Jyn more than the kyber crystal. "Twenty-five." 

Jyn clutches it and fixes her with an offended stare. “It’s not for sale.”

The jewelry seller waves a dismissive hand. “Give that one to his sister then, and be off.”

Chin jutted, Jyn says, “Yours aren’t even real.” The jewelry seller squawks, and Bodhi backs Jyn out of the stall and away to find Chirrut and Baze.

“What color is this?” Chirrut asks when they find the Guardians in a potter’s booth. He holds a stoneware bowl.

“I’m right here,” Baze says, indignant.

Chirrut pats his shoulder. “You have no poetry.”

“It’s the color of the sky just before dawn,” Jyn declares before Bodhi can think of something better--which he would, given a handful of seconds. He keeps trying to tell her metaphors aren’t a race.

“So, purple,” Baze clarifies.

In any event, Chirrut is satisfied by this, and replaces the bowl. Two booths down, when Jyn is distracted and Chirrut feels the texture of a shawl, Bodhi says, “The colors are so bright they seem like they should clash, like it should burn to look at the combination. But they’re harmonious, like a prayer.”

Chirrut smiles broadly. The vendor isn’t trying to push a sale on a Guardian, what with the vow of poverty, but he does ask Bodhi what his day rate is. “I’m not for hire,” Bodhi calls over his shoulder.

“What are these?” Jyn asks when he joins her in a stall across the lane.

What they are is discs of glass in small golden cases, with needles suspended on the inside. “Look,” he says, taking one from the box and turning his hand. “They aim toward the magnetic pole. They’re easy to spoof, though.” He gets out his multitool and switches on the solenoid, and all the needles in the box turn toward him.

“Yes, but what’s the point of them?” Jyn presses.

“Explorers use them to find their way.”

“Why not just have a navsat connection?”

Bodhi stares at her. She lives in an orphanage and eats porridge at every meal and keeps company with a man who has been blind for years because Jedha doesn’t have the medical capabilities to reverse the condition, and she still thinks there are navsats here. “Jyn, there isn’t anything between us and the stars.”

Her expression goes wistful. “On Coruscant, everyone had automatic navigation. It was the only way to get around in the city. It calculated speeder vectors too, and kept people from crashing.”

The best part of her stories is catching her in contradictions and obvious lies. “You’ve never been to Coruscant.”

“Have too! I grew up there.”

“You _said_ you grew up on a farm.”

“People move, Bodhi.” She sounds so urbane. Bodhi rolls his eyes and goes to the back of the booth to pay the seller. “Wait, you’re actually getting her that?” Jyn loosens her prim accent. " _I’m Bodhi Rook. What do girls like?_ "

“What are girls?” Bodhi replies, handing over most of his credits.

They find the Guardians a few booths away, testing the jogan fruit. Chirrut sniffs one. “Out of season,” Baze tells him.

For once, Jyn’s wit is both quick and sharp. “They look like despair.”

“Chuba!” says the vendor, and Jyn grabs Bodhi’s hand and bolts. “Harpy spawn,” the vendor calls after them.

Jyn keeps running all the way to Bodhi’s front door, and Bodhi catches his breath by the time the Guardians arrive at a more dignified pace. They all beat the dust from their clothes and shoes and go inside, where Bodhi wishes his sister a happy birthday and gives her the compass. Her eyes light up. Bodhi gives Jyn a pointed look.

There is extra fringi that evening, and his sister’s favorite soup, and Jyn wheedles Chirrut and Baze into staying longer so they can go up to the roof, and Bodhi sets out mats and lays face up. The dome of Jedha’s sky darkens overhead as the Guardians say the Sunset Prayer. “Which way are the Core Worlds?” Jyn asks. Bodhi points west, level with the horizon.

She’s silent for a long time, sitting up with her arms around her knees. “You were right,” she says at last. Bodhi turns his head. “There aren’t any navsats here.”

He snorts.

Jyn stretches, and then lays down and sighs. “Nothing between us and the stars.”

Bodhi smiles, partly because of how happy she sounds, and partly because Baze has begun to snore. The front door opens, and he sits up at once. “There she goes.”

“What?” Jyn follows him to the low wall at the edge of the roof. Below, his sister shoulders a bedroll and small pack, and sets off down the street. “Where is she going?”

“Contemplanys.” It’s an old Corellian word; he’s not sure why they use it here. “We all go when we turn fifteen. Everyone lives packed together inside the city, so the idea is to get out, spend a night in the open, think about your life.”

“Then what happens?”

Bodhi shrugs. “Nothing, usually.” The last time someone had prophetic visions was about five centuries ago. People come back and get on with what they always do. “It’s just a break from everything.”

“Will she be okay?”

“Sure. There’s nothing that dangerous in walking distance of the city.”

“Saw’s fortress is walking distance.” When Bodhi slides his gaze over to her, Jyn leans in and hisses, “Borrrrrrrr Gullet!”

He shoves her, and her shriek wakes Baze, who lifts his head from Chirrut’s lap.

“He’s trying to push me off the roof,” Jyn cries, even as she locks Bodhi’s arm behind his back.

Chirrut pokes her in the side with his stick, and she lets go of Bodhi. “It’s poor manners to accuse your host of attempting to kill you.”

“She’s _made_ of poor manners,” Bodhi says.

Jyn sticks her tongue out at him, but she does let him go. “Baze, will you carry me back to the temple?”

Baze grunts, getting to his feet. “Why don’t you carry me?” he says, and she lets out a horrified giggle.

“See you tomorrow,” Jyn says. Bodhi waves. He stays a while longer on the roof, watches them down the street until they turn the corner toward the temple. Then he turns the other way, and out in the desert beyond the walls, he thinks that might be a tiny figure, walking proudly toward the horizon.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter graciously betaed by ienablu.


	3. Forefathers

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Baze lowers himself cross-legged to the dusty ground, graceful despite holding Bodhi and Jyn. Chirrut stands facing the plaza so no one will bother them. “I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me,” Baze recites, low and measured, and already Bodhi feels his own panic subside. “I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me. I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me.”
> 
> Jyn isn’t struggling anymore, but it takes a few more repetitions before she starts her part. “The Force is with me,” she says, “and I am one with the Force.” Their voices blend, line up on the “and,” drift apart again. “The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force. The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force.” She takes a long, broken breath, and heaves it out against Bodhi’s shoulder. Baze loosens his hold on them.

Bodhi is thirteen, and Jyn is ten, and she’s fiercely strong and her elbows are _sharp_. “Take it back,” she screeches. The other girl stumbles out of Jyn’s reach. Jyn twists to face Bodhi now, trying to break his hold around her waist, and the Guardians are on their way from the edge of the plaza but he doesn’t think they’ll make it before she gets free--

“You’re crazy,” the other girl snaps.

Jyn howls, and then, thank the Force, Baze is there and his arms go around both Jyn and Bodhi, lifting them up and turning away. “She’s crazy,” the girl says again, softer this time in deference to authority. “And a liar.”

Jyn fights, even with Baze pinning her arms she fights. Bodhi will have bruises on his ribs.

Chirrut’s stick whacks the other girl’s shins. He tuts as she runs off. “Clumsy me.”

Baze lowers himself cross-legged to the dusty ground, graceful despite holding Bodhi and Jyn. Chirrut stands facing the plaza so no one will bother them. “I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me,” Baze recites, low and measured, and already Bodhi feels his own panic subside. “I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me. I am one with the Force, and the Force is with me.”

Jyn isn’t struggling anymore, but it takes a few more repetitions before she starts her part. “The Force is with me,” she says, “and I am one with the Force.” Their voices blend, line up on the “and,” drift apart again. “The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force. The Force is with me, and I am one with the Force.” She takes a long, broken breath, and heaves it out against Bodhi’s shoulder. Baze loosens his hold on them.

Jyn gets up and mops her face with her sleeve. She turns back and points at Bodhi. “You’re the only one allowed to call me a liar.”

He selects his words carefully as he moves to sit on the ground. “You don’t... know for sure your mother was a Jedi.”

Her face goes all pinched again and her voice climbs a register. “Why else would they shoot her?”

“What did she look like?” Chirrut asks, and Jyn closes her eyes and takes deep breaths through her nose.

“Her nose turned up at the end,” she says after a moment. “Her hair always got in her face. She didn’t used to smile, before we went to the farm. Her eyes…”

She squeezes her eyelids tighter. Her mouth compresses and turns down, and Bodhi offers, “They were the same as yours. Like moss on the black hills near your farm. Right?”

“Right,” she sighs.

Bodhi breathes out. Baze settles one hand on his shoulder. Bodhi looks to him and sees pride gazing back.

Chirrut turns his head first, and then Bodhi hears it: the whir of servomotors, the rasp of metal on cobblestones. The people crossing the plaza alter their course to avoid the man who enters it now. He walks ponderously to the center of the plaza; black armor weighs him down and skeletal prosthetics mince his steps. A trio of armed sentients with covered faces trail him. As Bodhi realizes these must be the Partisans of rumor and mutterings, he feels a pall of dread settle over the plaza.

Jyn breaks it by dashing right at the armored man. “Saw!” she cries.

A grin splits the man’s scarred face. Jyn leaps and he catches her without effort. “My child! Look how you’ve grown.”

Bodhi stares, his metric for objective truth shifting. Maybe Jyn’s mother _was_ a Jedi.

“Are you getting enough to eat? Do the other children treat you well?”

“I don’t talk to anyone but Bodhi,” Jyn tells him.

Saw looks past her, and Bodhi feels very small under his scrutiny. “An orphan?”

Bodhi shakes his head. Jyn says, “His family lives on the far side of the marketplace. Chirrut and Baze take me to his house every day for tea and fringi. You should come!”

She may not be a liar, but she is crazy. Bodhi opens his mouth and the only thing that comes out is a silent breath. Fortunately, Saw shakes his head. “I’ve already been in the city too long today. Perhaps another time.”

“When can I go live in your fortress?”

Saw laughs, a bright and incongruous sound. “It’s no place for you, not yet.” She droops. He sets Jyn down and puts his hands on her cheeks. “Brave face?” Jyn squares her shoulders, and Bodhi can’t see her face, but Saw looks satisfied. He straightens, takes something from a gap in his armor, and tosses it across the plaza. Chirrut’s hand snaps up to catch it, and Bodhi hears a metallic jingle. “For your trouble.”

“She is no trouble,” says Chirrut, but he pockets the credits all the same.

Saw scoffs, “You think I didn’t see what just happened?” He gives Jyn one more fond pat and says, “Remember, when you can’t reach, spit.” And then he turns and steps slowly back out of the plaza, and when he’s gone Jyn turns around and looks right at Bodhi.

“Are you sorry you doubted me?” she demands.

“No,” Bodhi answers. Jyn sticks her tongue out at him.

A funeral procession enters the plaza, following in Saw’s wake. Bodhi and Baze stand and Chirrut herds Jyn over with his stick, and as the mourners pass, the four of them join their ongoing prayer. Jyn follows Chirrut’s part a beat behind him, and Bodhi does the same with Baze.

“I am one with--” _I am one with--_ “the Force and--” _the Force and--_ “the Force is--” _the Force is--_ “with me” _with me._

The pallet with its passenger, covered in a red shroud, is borne past them.

“The Force is--” _The Force is--_ “with me and--” _with me and--_ “I am one with--” _I am one with_ \-- “the Force” _the Force_.

The last of the procession disappears through the archway and it is nearly sundown. Chirrut ushers them in the opposite direction. Bodhi thinks of the respirator mask on Saw’s chestplate, the droid feet that carried him achingly slow. He fumbles for the right words. He’s never had the nerve to ask before. “Chirrut, when you lost your sight... was it before or after the bacta crisis?”

“Before,” Chirrut answers at once.

“So you could have gotten healed.” No physician in NiJedha would turn away a Guardian.

“Was I dying?”

Bodhi has no idea why Chirrut’s asking him that, but in any case, Baze is the one who answers. “You were complaining too much to be dying.”

Chirrut finds Bodhi’s shoulder with his hand, and tucks his stick under his other arm as they approach a traffic-clogged section of street. “If you drop a credit on your way to the market,” Chirrut asks him, “do you wait until you’ve saved up what you need again, or do you negotiate with the seller so that what you have is enough?”

He won’t get out of Bodhi’s questioning that easily. “Permanent blindness is not a mild inconvenience,” Bodhi says, and then he feels like a complete barve for explaining that to a blind man.

Chirrut just chuckles. “Very well. You’re thirteen. Do your parents still spoon feed you?”

Bodhi grimaces. “No!”

“Do your tutors allow you to stack blocks during lessons?”

“I have real work.”

“Responsibility,” Chirrut names it. “Some things are not as easy for you anymore, but they are your burdens and you can take pride in them. You’ll find that this continues to happen as you get older.” He lets go of Bodhi’s shoulder as the crowd thins. “Though I did complain, I recognized the dawn of a new part of my life. Why reject what was offered me, when I could learn to manage its challenges and find the space to make it my own?”

Bodhi studies his face. “I still don’t understand.”

“No, not yet,” Chirrut answers. “I remember Baze’s face, and the house I was born in. I fight better now than I ever did with my sight, and each day brings new opportunities to trust in the Force.”

Later at his house, on the front stoop, wiping fringi crumbs off his fingers, Bodhi looks sidelong at Jyn. “Don’t go live in Saw’s fortress,” he mumbles.

“What?” She heard him perfectly well.

Bodhi looks back down at his feet. “Chirrut and Baze would miss you.” She has four fathers.

When the Guardians carry her back to the temple, Bodhi goes inside. Jyn left one of his sister’s trinkets--a little carved bantha--in the sitting room. Bodhi picks it up, straightens the cushions, looks in each room before he goes upstairs. He puts the bantha on the shelf just inside his sister’s door.

In the hall his ami passes by. Bodhi hugs her around the waist and looks into her eyes. He’s almost as tall as her now.

She smoothes Bodhi’s hair and smiles down at him. Bodhi wonders if he could ever forget her face.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's all pain from here, friends! :))))))
> 
> This chapter once again betaed by the marvelous ienablu.


	4. Contemplanys II

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jyn sees the angle of his face, and can stay quiet no longer. “Are you going to leave like she did?”
> 
> Bodhi shuts his eyes and blows out a breath. He reaches out and gathers a handful of sand, lets it all slip through his fingers. “No,” he says when his hand empties. He isn’t going to leave. He’s going to take root.
> 
> He already knows all of the Guardians’ prayers and most of the daily observances. He thinks he believes, and if he doesn’t, this is the easiest way to find out. And if he does, if he makes it through the training, someday he may be able to offer someone else the same peace Chirrut and Baze give to everyone they meet.
> 
> Bodhi runs his hand through his hair and tries to picture it shorn off. He realizes his hand must have left specks of sand and dust behind, perhaps microscopic fragments of kyber among them. The same particles that live in the hearts of stars, forming constellations in his hair.

Bodhi is fifteen, and Jyn is twelve, and she is not supposed to be here. “What do you think you’re doing?”

She has something in her hands, but it’s hard to make out in the dark. She’s a girl-shaped silhouette against the vague glow of the city on the horizon. “There weren’t any compasses in the market today. I’m sorry I missed supper. I was getting you this.”

Whatever it is, he doesn’t take it. “They’ll be searching for you at the temple.”

Jyn shakes her head. “I only sleep there about half the time now.”

“Where are you sleeping?” She’s silent. He can imagine her jutting her chin. “Jyn, where are you sleeping?”

“Saw has been training me,” she says.

“Training you for what?” The Partisans’ silence is cause for consternation in the city. If they have good intentions, goes the talk over tea, why not make a home inside the walls alongside everyone else? Bodhi can’t wrap his mind around the idea of Chirrut and Baze permitting Jyn to go to the fortress for training, let alone stay overnight. But then, if Saw’s credits feed the orphanage, do they have a choice?

She shrugs. “To be ready when the wind changes. And to use things like this.” She flips a switch on the object she’s holding and an indicator glows green. “It’s digital, and it has scanning capabilities, and it can find magnetic _and_ true north.” She holds it out to him. “It’s not easy to spoof.”

Bodhi takes the device. It fits in his hand, and on its screen a pale line sweeps a circle around a central dot. There’s one more dot near the middle, and beyond that, nothing for whatever the scanning radius is. “Thanks,” Bodhi tells her. “Now go home.” And he turns on his heel and keeps marching.

Her footsteps follow him, because of course. “I came all this way. Just let me go with you.”

“I’m _supposed_ to be alone.”

“What if I don’t talk?”

Bodhi rounds on her. “Why do you have to be in the middle of everything? You think I don’t have some things I need to work through?”

He can’t see her expression, but he can see the whites of her eyes. “I miss her too,” she says softly.

“Go home, Jyn.”

She stares at him a moment longer. “Okay,” she says at last, and she walks away.

Southeast. Toward the fortress.

“Wrong way,” he calls. She waves and keeps going.

A sound works its way out of his chest, weak and resigned. He jogs after her, takes her arm, turns her around. Her teeth flash in the dark.

Another kilometer north, Bodhi sets his pack down. The spot feels right, or maybe he’s just tired of walking. Jyn sweeps rocks aside with her feet and makes divots in the ground for their hips and shoulders. She lays out the bedroll, no bigger than the mat they share when they go up on the roof of his house. The blanket will just barely cover both of them, if they lay back to back.

They take off their boots and sit. Bodhi’s mother packed roci, which he splits with Jyn, and a little clay jar of wine, which he does not split with Jyn. He can feel her attention on him as he drinks it, and her envy, but she doesn’t ask for any. There isn’t enough of it to get drunk, just enough to warm him.

The dark is almost total, except for the stars. Bodhi closes his eyes and works to imagine the landscape around him, the view to which he will wake up in the morning. Chirrut told him the Force flows through all things, even stone and sand. Bodhi listens as hard as he can.

Jyn breathes beside him, trying to be quiet. That’s all. He can neither hear nor feel the shape of the mesas and fallen statues around them. The city does not pulse in his senses like a beacon of life in the distance.

He half-dreads the silence, and any enlightenment that may come of it. He tries looking to the stars instead. They are fixed, clear and unflinching, in their multitudes in the cold sky. Bodhi indulges the notion that they look back at him, and tries to determine whether it is with compassion or judgment.

He can’t bring himself to feel anything but cosmic indifference. Any decision he makes now is of no consequence to them. They do not contain life. He is alive, Jyn is alive, and all around them is dormant.

Jyn sees the angle of his face, and can stay quiet no longer. “Are you going to leave like she did?”

Bodhi shuts his eyes and blows out a breath. He reaches out and gathers a handful of sand, lets it all slip through his fingers. “No,” he says when his hand empties. He isn’t going to leave. He’s going to take root.

He already knows all of the Guardians’ prayers and most of the daily observances. He thinks he believes, and if he doesn’t, this is the easiest way to find out. And if he does, if he makes it through the training, someday he may be able to offer someone else the same peace Chirrut and Baze give to everyone they meet.

Bodhi runs his hand through his hair and tries to picture it shorn off. He realizes his hand must have left specks of sand and dust behind, perhaps microscopic fragments of kyber among them. The same particles that live in the hearts of stars, forming constellations in his hair.

He lays down with a smile on his face. Jyn does the same, warm at his back. They are the only life for kilometers outside the city. There is nothing between them and the stars.

When he wakes the cold and distant sun loiters on the horizon, and sand has blown into his face. Bodhi sits up and rubs it out of his eyes. He looks toward NiJedha, rubs his eyes again to clear the blur.

He rubs his eyes again to make the pale knifepoint shape over the city go away.

Jyn stirs. Bodhi tugs on her arm. She sits up and looks where he’s looking. “Get up,” she orders, and when he doesn’t, she shoves him off the bedroll. She puts her boots on and throws everything else into the pack, slinging it onto her shoulders without closing the top. It bounces as she runs. The little clay jar falls out onto the ground.

Bodhi processes, slowly, that if Jyn sprints for four kilometers, he’ll have to carry her the fifth. Fingers numb, he pulls on his boots. He picks up the jar on his way after her.

He grabs for the pack but she shrugs out of it, so Bodhi has to stop and close the top and put his arms in the straps. He overtakes her again momentarily and gets in front of her, grabs her shoulders and digs his heels into the sand. “If they’re dead, running won’t change it,” he tells her.

She stills, nostrils flaring and eyes still on the Star Destroyer over the city. The wind picks up in the vacant space between them and home. Finally she meets his gaze and nods once.

He lets go of her shoulders and takes her hand instead, and they walk. He makes his stride shorter and quicker to match hers. Their fingers interlace, tight: Bodhi squeezing to keep Jyn slow, Jyn squeezing to show how much she hates this. He hates it too.

They are silent, the only living things in the desert. Over the next hour the mesa, the city walls, and the blade hanging over the city all loom larger. Bodhi thinks on it. He has time to do that, and his thoughts are astonishingly organized and measured, overlaying what he sees with the precious little he knows of Imperial occupation practices.

This is not what orbital bombardment looks like. It doesn’t meet either of the criteria. Which means the Empire can benefit somehow from a suppressed Jedhan populace, as much as they can from any other suppressed populace. On a world without resources, the people become resources.

There are shuttles going to and from the capital ship. Bringing, or taking, or both, but not firing. No TIE squadrons are airborne.

What he does not see is activity from the east. The Partisans make no move. This is the wind changing, and if they strike now they could destabilize whatever foothold the Empire already has, maybe even scare them off, show that Jedha has teeth. Instead they lean back, like a dejarik player trying to stretch their turn.

What is the point of them?

At the mesa’s north face they find the tunnel and climb into the cramped mechanical mining lift. The silence is broken when Jyn pulls the lever and the lift squeals and judders them up to the top of the wall. From there Bodhi sees smoke rise over several districts before Jyn pulls on his hand and leads him down the steps. It’s certainly not quiet in the city, but he doesn’t hear mourning wails, and for that he is unspeakably grateful.

They reach the bottom of the steps and follow the alley. Jyn turns the corner to the street, and then she flinches back when a towering beetle-black droid announces, “Planet-wide curfew is at nineteen hundred hours. Curfew violations are punishable with detention. Move along.” Jyn stares, and the droid tells her to move along again, and Bodhi pulls her hand until she does.

Half the streets are blocked by troopers with armored speeders. Before, people flowed through the Holy Quarter neatly, like threads on a loom; now they tangle and shove. They get caught up in plazas in twos and threes, but don’t congregate for long. Over the uneasy susurrus, droids make their curfew declarations every hundred meters.

At the edge of the temple’s shadow the crowd thickens and Bodhi loses his grip on Jyn. She’s ahead of him somewhere. They are going the same way, and as much as he wants to run straight home, they both need to see the temple first. He apologizes quietly as he pushes people aside, awkward with the pack on his shoulders.

He hears Baze before he sees the temple courtyard. He sees the broken temple doors before he sees Baze. He sees Baze in the temple courtyard, dwarfing Jyn, who tries to hold him back. He hears Baze shout at Chirrut, who stands with a handful of frightened orphans.

“Is this as the Force wills it?” Baze’s voice is awful. Broken. “They destroy our home!”

Stormtroopers bring a hovercart out through the doors, loaded with stasis canisters. How many kyber crystals did the temple hold? Thousands?

Baze reels toward them. “Stop it,” Jyn sobs, pushing at his chest. She looks like a single plank levering up a sagging stone wall. “They’ll shoot you! They’ll shoot you.”

Some of the stormtroopers are watching now. Bodhi snaps back to himself, breaks through the crowd and reaches them at the same time Chirrut does.

“You can’t see it,” Baze tells Chirrut. “Be grateful you can’t see it. Is this as the Force wills it?”

Chirrut reaches to touch Baze’s face, and Baze pushes his hand away. Chirrut holds his arm instead. “Take Jyn and go home,” he tells Bodhi, and then he guides Baze over to the other orphans.

Jyn stares after them. Tears track through the dust on her cheeks. Bodhi wraps his arm around her shoulders and moves back through the crowd. It’s slow going that way--each step seems to take longer than the last. Down one blocked alley he glimpses smoke and rubble. Two storefronts and one tapcafe along their path have been gutted, and in the market, stormtroopers tear down stalls that don’t meet some obscure standard. Jyn and Bodhi keep their heads down, make themselves smaller. Bodhi steps over false kyber crystals, shattered in the dust.

His front door is unbroken, and when he opens it, his ami practically collapses into his arms. She pulls him and Jyn to her, kisses both their faces. His aba is home from work, in the kitchen with bitter tea and a heavy expression. “We’re okay,” Bodhi tells them, though he isn’t sure. “We’re okay.”

His ami wipes Jyn’s face with her sleeve, and his aba sends them upstairs with tea. They go to his sister’s old room to look out her window toward the temple. The city is carved into two thirds sunlight and one third shadow.

“What about when the rains come?” Jyn asks. “That’s what, three districts that won’t get the water?”

Four. The other districts will have to share with them. Everything will have to stretch further, last longer.

“It feels heavier with that thing up there,” Bodhi says. That isn’t how repulsors work, but Jyn doesn’t correct him.

Where are the Partisans? Where is the Rebellion? Does anyone care?

Planetwide curfew at nineteen hundred hours means no more music in the squares, no poetry readings at Gesh’s. It means the miners will lose two whole shifts, will come up from underneath the mesa and immediately go home instead of out together. The Empire will probably demand increased output despite the restricted hours. They’re here for the kyber and they will break as many backs as they need to in order to get it.

It means he won’t sit on the front stoop eating fringi until the Guardians come out and recite the Sunset Prayer, ever again. He would have willingly traded that for maturity, for the next stage of his life that was meant to begin this morning. Instead he has only dread.

 _Why reject what was offered me_ , Chirrut said, _when I could learn to manage its challenges and find the space to make it my own?_ But where in Jedha City under the Empire is there space to grow?

“I’m going to the fortress tonight,” Jyn says.

“Don’t be stupid,” Bodhi says, without bite in his voice. “You can stay here until things settle.” The room is mostly as his sister left it. His aba and ami won’t mind--will be glad, even, to offer her some safety.

And what will it look like, when things settle? At what point will Bodhi look at the blocked streets, the curfew droids, and think _Ah, yes, this is normal_?

His sister was right to leave. He couldn’t understand, before, why she came back from her contemplanys with the conviction that she had to get off the planet. Maybe she saw this coming.

“I’m going to the fortress,” Jyn says again, her eyes on the temple. “I know how to sneak out of the city. Getting down the mesa is easy.”

Bodhi wants to ask what good it will do, for her to be out there instead of here, what she can hope to accomplish, but he knows she has no answer, only a belief (one he understands, but doesn’t share) that moving is better than stillness.

They don’t drink the tea. They eat only when his aba brings two bowls of til. They look out over the city until sunset, and Bodhi wants to pray but the words stick in his throat. They look out until every door on his street slides shut and the city is darker than he’s ever seen it, houses unlit and the Star Destroyer blocking a slice of the sky. Bodhi pushes away from the window then, afraid that if he looks out any longer, he’ll see what happens when someone breaks curfew.

Jyn lays on his sister’s bed, feet dangling over the side. “I’ll wait a few hours and then I’ll go.”

Bodhi no longer has the energy to argue. He doesn’t have the energy for much except one last question. All her stories, her father the captive scientist, the man in white who wanted to bring her along, her mother who would rather die than live as a hostage, it all seemed so patently false, so far from a reality he would recognize. Now, though… “What will you do if they catch you?”

“I won’t mention you,” she vows, but that’s not a promise she can make. “If they’re here for me, I’m sorry.”

He shakes his head. “They’re not just here for you.” They’re here for the kyber, and they’re here to crush everyone in NiJedha as they’ve crushed Baze. _Is this as the Force wills it?_

Bodhi goes to his room and stays awake for a long time, but he doesn’t hear Jyn sneak out. He and the city both are stuck at bottom of an exhale, lungs empty, afraid to breathe in again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter once again betaed by the excellent ienablu.


	5. True North

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He coasts to a stop between stone Jedi, where a small guard detail waits. The escorts pull up a few meters behind them, closing the ring. Jyn climbs off first. “You stole a swoop for Saw Gerrera,” Bodhi says to her as he shuts it down, “and you can’t even fly it out here yourself?”
> 
> “The swoop?” she echoes, shrugging out of the pack. “No, I didn’t--”
> 
> “Jyn.” She turns. Saw scrapes toward them through the dust. “What have you brought me?”
> 
> Jyn gives Bodhi a hand climbing off the swoop, and then keeps holding onto him. “You remember Bodhi Rook. He’s training to be a pilot.”
> 
> Saw looks him over, and Bodhi understands. He twists his arm out of Jyn’s grasp and faces her. “You’re trying to recruit me?”
> 
> Jyn stares at him. “What did you think I was doing?”

Bodhi is sixteen, and Jyn is thirteen, and when he’s released from classes for the afternoon she is waiting across the plaza, and Bodhi stops short on the steps and almost trips the boy behind him. Jyn doesn’t wave, but lifts her chin, her expression urgent.

He checks the plaza. It’s clear of patrols for the moment. He crosses to Jyn, and waits for her to talk first. She looks well enough--not malnourished, and dressed warmly.

“How’s school?” she says.

“Fine,” Bodhi lies. He was kept late because no one in his class would say who vandalized the ‘fresher wall with a drawing of a harpa seed. As subversion goes, it’s obscure; offworlders don’t usually know the seeds can lie dormant in the desert for centuries before sprouting when conditions permit.

“How are Baze and Chirrut?” he asks Jyn. He passes them in the streets every so often, when Chirrut collects alms. They don’t bring Jyn out with them anymore, and certainly not to Bodhi’s house in the afternoons.

“Fine. Is your ami expecting you soon?”

“Why?”

“Come with me,” Jyn says. And she walks off without waiting to see if he’ll follow.

He follows. At the edge of the Middle District Jyn cuts through a blasted section of wall, and on the other side of it is the Holy Quarter. There are all sorts of shortcuts through the city now. Where the Empire blocked streets, the Partisans made new doors.

Jyn leads him to the northernmost lift, and at the obligatory checkpoint she offers a droid two sets of scandocs.

“What’s your purpose?” the droid asks, and if Bodhi’s heart wasn’t pounding so hard he would say something about how existential that question is.

Jyn hefts the pack on her back. “Medical supplies for the Rivrini settlement.”

“And him?”

She takes Bodhi’s arm. “He’s my pilot.”

The droid hands the scandocs back. “Move along.”

They do. In the lift Bodhi squints at the illuminated rectangle bearing his face. “Who’s Asir Mindu?” he says over the rattle of their descent.

“He’s you, if you need him.” Jyn holds his gaze. “I can make those for your whole family.”

Bodhi tucks the scandoc away. “What’s in the pack?”

“Nothing.”

He lets her keep her secrets. The lift reaches the desert floor and they fold its door back. At the end of the tunnel waits a Zephyr-C swoop. “Did you steal this?” Bodhi demands.

“No,” Jyn says, too quickly. Bodhi squints at her. “Can you fly it or not?”

He performs a quick inspection. The swoop is beat up but functional, and he swings one leg over and tests the repulsor controls. Its single thruster has been modified to near silence. Bodhi turns to Jyn. “Where are we going?”

Jyn climbs on behind him, clasps her hands beneath his ribs. Bodhi waits another breath, and when she doesn’t speak he nudges the swoop forward.

He glides away from the mesa and heads in no particular direction, wending between the red hills and fallen statues. The swoop handles well, and he and Jyn lean together on sharp turns. Once he revs it, just to see, and almost loses his grip from the acceleration. He grins.

And then they break out from the hills to a plain east of the city, and Jyn taps his shoulder, and Bodhi turns accordingly, and his grin fades.

He knew it. He knew it, and still he came along.

They’re still a kilometer out from the Partisans’ fortress when two more swoops speed out, passengers on the back training long-barreled rifles on them. Jyn produces a signal lamp and flashes a bit of blink code, and the Partisans peel off to flank them instead.

He coasts to a stop between stone Jedi, where a small guard detail waits. The escorts pull up a few meters behind them, closing the ring. Jyn climbs off first. “You stole a swoop for Saw Gerrera,” Bodhi says to her as he shuts it down, “and you can’t even fly it out here yourself?”

“The swoop?” she echoes, shrugging out of the pack. “No, I didn’t--”

“Jyn.” She turns. Saw scrapes toward them through the dust. “What have you brought me?”

Jyn gives Bodhi a hand climbing off the swoop, and then keeps holding onto him. “You remember Bodhi Rook. He’s training to be a pilot.”

Saw looks him over, and Bodhi understands. He twists his arm out of Jyn’s grasp and faces her. “You’re trying to recruit me?”

Jyn stares at him. “What did you think I was doing?”

He came along, if he’s honest, because he has to see if they misread each other so thoroughly. If they ever really knew each other. “Did you plan to bribe me? I join up and you’ll forge scandocs for my family?”

“I can get you scandocs even if you don’t join up.” For a second she looks like she’s about to make some kind of joke, and Bodhi isn’t sure what he’ll do if she does, if she’s not taking this seriously. But then she sobers and says, “Eventually you’ll be what the Empire wants you to be. Do you want to sit in your classes and wait for that day, or make a difference now?”

His classes have traded Jedhan history for astrogation, philosophy for the Protectorate Decree. They’re keeping the older population low and shaping the young into good citizens like a factory line, but they started too late on him. They can’t reach the core, no matter how compliant he makes himself. He keeps it buried like a seed, a crystal. They can’t reach it.

Bodhi casts a look at their armed audience. He lowers his voice for her sake. “Not like this.”

“I don’t see what the problem is,” Jyn sulks. “We used to do everything together. Why not this too?”

Rage fills him, makes him shake. He wants to shake _her_. Through his teeth Bodhi says, “Partisan raids leave Jedhan corpses.”

Grenades in alleys, firefights in the squares. What can the Partisans claim to fight for? Who will be left to enjoy their freedom?

To her credit, Jyn does not try to claim they weren’t responsible for those deaths. “The Empire will conscript you,” she says.

She can’t solve that problem by creating another. Bodhi is sick of them talking past each other. “I’d rather be conscripted than press-ganged by my friend.”

Her gaze is sharp now. “Why?”

“Because some of us have _things to lose_!” Bodhi’s voice cracks. Jyn flinches. He takes a breath. “The city is suffering enough. Jedha doesn’t feed him.”

Eyes wide, Jyn looks toward Saw, and the rest of the Partisans tense, waiting. It occurs to Bodhi that he has just criticized a warlord’s methods and shouted at a warlord’s ward, and he may be shot soon. He’s too furious to feel dread, but he dares a glance at Saw Gerrera.

Saw’s head is tilted, his gaze soft. He shrugs under the armor, hands wide, a gesture of surrender. “The young man doesn’t want to fight,” Saw says. “Take him back to the city, Jyn.”

What a terrifying figure he was only a handful of years ago. Now Bodhi has denied him something, and he makes no protest. Can this really be the same man with so much blood on his hands?

Jyn kicks the empty pack on her way to the swoop. Bodhi follows with a bitter taste in his mouth. She’s a kid, and even with all the things she has lost, it hasn’t been enough to make her grow up.

He gets behind her on the swoop and loops his arm around her waist. Jyn eases away from the base of the fortress, and once they’re past the ring of Partisans she punches the throttle. Despite the modifications, the thruster is too loud at that speed for them to talk. It’s clear from the set of Jyn’s shoulders that she’s trying to figure out what else to say to him.

When she skids up hard at the bottom of the mesa, repulsors working against momentum, Bodhi lets go of her and climbs off. At the mouth of the tunnel he turns back and waits, gives her a shot at the last word.

Jyn’s face is flint-hard. “I had one thing left to lose,” she says, and she pulls away, back toward the fortress.

He takes the lift up and stands on the wall for a long time, looking at the pockmarked city.

“The Rivrini settlement is a six hour ride,” says the droid at the checkpoint.

“We crashed,” Bodhi answers, and keeps walking.

The sun is leaking down past the horizon, and it’s after 1800 hours, and he ought to go straight home. He doesn’t. There are twenty-four stairs leading up to the hollowed-out attic just outside the Holy Quarter where the Guardians are staying, with no railing. How does Chirrut do it?

The attic door doesn’t lock. Bodhi lifts the latch and steps inside.

Their room is sparse and fastidiously swept, by Chirrut, he thinks. There is a bed against one wall, blankets rumpled, and a small mat under the single window, blankets neatly tucked. A crate by the door is home to Baze’s new arsenal.

Baze stoops over a double cook surface next to the window, tending palm-sized roci and a little pot of broth. He spares Bodhi a trace of a smile.

Chirrut sits in the center of the floor, where the last light falls on his face, and softly recites the Sunset Prayer. Bodhi takes off his boots and sits beside him. He waits in silence; the prayer is stronger with Chirrut alone than it would be with Bodhi.

The light through the window fades, and Chirrut stills.

“You know what she’s doing?” Bodhi says. Chirrut nods. “And you’re not worried?”

“Of course we are,” Baze rumbles.

“We’ve offered protection and guidance these years,” Chirrut says. “She was never ours to control.”

They needed her, needed to look after someone, as much as she needed them. So much for being Guardians.

Bodhi can’t bring himself to say that, not with Baze right there to glare--or worse, laugh. Instead he says, “It’s like she’s not even afraid of dying.”

Chirrut draws in a breath and lets it out slowly before speaking. “Have you considered that she is, and that’s why she wants you with her?”

“With you, she’s safe,” Baze adds.

“I can’t go there with her,” Bodhi says.

“Then she will have to find her own way,” Chirrut replies.

This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. People aren’t supposed to be pulled in so many directions when bad things happen, when they’re pressed under the monumental weight of the Empire. They’re supposed to band together. They’re supposed to have reasons to become closer, stronger.

“I can’t be that for her,” Bodhi says, whispering now for the lump in his throat.

“Here, little brother,” says Baze. He divides up the food: enough to satisfy one person maybe, intended for two, and now portioned for three. Bodhi shakes his head. He can’t take their food, he can’t--

Chirrut tilts his ear toward the window. “You’ve missed curfew. You should comm your ami.”  

He does, and she answers at once in a full scale panic, which means Bodhi has to breathe and steady his voice. He tells her he’s safe, he’ll be back first thing in the morning, he loves her. She’s mostly calm by the time Bodhi signs off. So is he.

Baze presses a bowl and a piece of roci into his hands. Bodhi eats, and though he expects all food to taste like ash after what just happened, it’s delicious. Baze baked plenty of kamik root into the roci, and the sharp flavor makes it feel more filling.

After supper Chirrut brews tea. It’s sweeter than the blend Bodhi is used to. Outside, there is no sound in the city, no Partisan raids tonight; inside, there is Baze’s warm voice reading aloud from an old bookchip, and Chirrut closes his eyes and leans his head back, smiling.

Bodhi would not have imagined any relationship could survive what theirs has. Baze, in the absence of the belief he held for four decades, now seems to believe in Chirrut to the exclusion of all else. Chirrut acts as if his unflaggingly devout partner is still in there somewhere, under the longer hair and the baggy flightsuit.

Perhaps it’s only the young who abandon each other for principle.

He startles awake when Chirrut pats his shoulder. On the mat by the window, the blankets are folded down. Bodhi nods his thanks, catches himself, says, “Thanks.” He gets under the covers. Up through the window he can see the tip of the Star Destroyer. Beyond it, navsats streak across the stars.

In the morning, after Baze insists that he drink a share of their blue milk ration, Bodhi puts his boots back on and thanks him and Chirrut. He looks back at the empty mat before he shuts the door.

He goes home and promises his ami he’ll never do it again. She puts her hands on either side of his face and says, “I’m glad you were with the Guardians.”

Bodhi nods. He’s glad that at least someone was.


	6. Contemplanys III

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Jyn picks up her pace when they’re still yards away, as soon as she hears his voice, and by the time Bodhi arrives she is with the other listeners. Bodhi hangs back by the south wall, still standing.
> 
> “In times of darkness and despair,” Chirrut says, “how can we continue to believe that all is as the Force wills it? From where do we receive assurances?”
> 
> There’s a lone stormtrooper leaning in the east archway, waiting to enforce curfew. It’s looking in Bodhi’s direction, so Bodhi nods, clipped and professional and very much in contrast to the churning in his gut. The stormtrooper turns its helmet away.
> 
> “When all circumstances oppose the notion that we are luminous beings, how can our faith possibly be rewarded and nurtured?”
> 
> In the west archway stands Baze. Bodhi has spotted him in the city half a dozen times over the past two years, and each time his hair is longer and he looks less and less like a man inclined to smile. The newest addition to his wardrobe is a heavy looking red collar piece. Bodhi is reminded of Saw Gerrera.
> 
> Baze returns Bodhi’s stare flatly. Is he judging Bodhi, in his Imperial flightsuit, as harshly as Bodhi judges him?

Bodhi is eighteen, and Jyn is fifteen, and she could be executed for sneaking into the barracks. At least, he thinks that’s what the officers would do. Uncertainty is their primary deterrent.

On that note, he could be executed too. Still, when she takes her hand off his mouth, Bodhi does not immediately tell Jyn to leave. “What are you doing here?”

She crouches by his cot. “Saw says it’s too dangerous for me to stay on Jedha.”

Bodhi sits up, crosses his legs. His cot is at the far end of the barracks and she’s hidden from the others behind him. “He’s cutting you loose?” He could follow it with any of a dozen wisecracks about despotic parenting, but he can see how brave she’s trying to be, how deeply she’s burying the rejection.

“I have to get off planet. If there were any other option, I wouldn’t ask you. Saw gave me some credits. I can pay--”

“Keep them,” Bodhi says. His first unaccompanied delivery run is coming up. “Where are you staying in the city?”

“The old reliquary,” Jyn says. “I’ll need schematics, to find a place to hide.”

He hands her the manual chip from his shelf. “SW-0314,” he says. “In the east depot. Dustoff is at curfew in two days.”

Jyn nods. She gets up, hesitates. “Thank you,” she whispers, and then she slips out through the shadows.

At dusk two days later, Bodhi pays his tab in a tapcafe and walks up the Path of Judgments. Near the reliquary he fiddles with his commlink like the signal’s gone out, until Jyn emerges with her scarf over her head. They keep to opposite sides of the street. Sometimes Bodhi pulls ahead, sometimes Jyn. At crossroads, she follows his turns, though he isn’t sure where he’s going either.

Still, he finds them. In Tythoni Square half a dozen people sit on the ground as Chirrut paces and sermonizes. Jyn picks up her pace when they’re still yards away, as soon as she hears his voice, and by the time Bodhi arrives she is with the other listeners. Bodhi hangs back by the south wall, still standing.

“In times of darkness and despair,” Chirrut says, “how can we continue to believe that all is as the Force wills it? From where do we receive assurances?”

There’s a lone stormtrooper leaning in the east archway, waiting to enforce curfew. It’s looking in Bodhi’s direction, so Bodhi nods, clipped and professional and very much in contrast to the churning in his gut. The stormtrooper turns its helmet away.

“When all circumstances oppose the notion that we are luminous beings, how can our faith possibly be rewarded and nurtured?”

In the west archway stands Baze. Bodhi has spotted him in the city half a dozen times over the past two years, and each time his hair is longer and he looks less and less like a man inclined to smile. The newest addition to his wardrobe is a heavy looking red collar piece. Bodhi is reminded of Saw Gerrera.

Baze returns Bodhi’s stare flatly. Is he judging Bodhi, in his Imperial flightsuit, as harshly as Bodhi judges him?

“While we must all find our own answers to these questions, I submit to you, brothers and sisters, that answer lies in the seeking. We must always look for the Force, never cease listening for its call. Seek the Force on the horizon, in the city’s streets, in your family’s eyes. Look for the Force, and you will always find peace. I am one with the Force...”

The faithful pray with him, and then Chirrut gives benedictions to those who don’t leave immediately. When it’s Jyn’s turn, Chirrut presses his brow to hers. He says something too softly for Bodhi to hear. Baze stalks over and puts his hand on Jyn’s shoulder, and then he and Chirrut walk into the evening together.

Bodhi and Jyn leave the square by different streets, bound for the same destination. The enforcer droids announce when curfew is ten minutes away, and again at five minutes. Bodhi takes his time.

At the depot, troops load the last crates, Misurno wishes him a good run, and Bodhi completes his preflight check. He tells himself she’s here, somewhere. She wasn’t caught and she didn’t board the wrong shuttle. He forces himself to breathe, be steady. There will not be a garrison waiting at his destination. The Empire doesn’t know.

He tells himself that as he pulls away from the depot, as he breaks Jedha’s gravity, as he enters hyperspace, as he sits there for the five hour jump to Fentersohn, as he confirms the manifest with the receiving officer, as he pulls away again.

When the shuttle is back in the cocoon of hyperspace, he climbs down into the empty cargo bay and says, “It’s safe.” Not “You can come out now,” which is what he would say if the receiving officer stayed aboard and had a blaster pointed at Bodhi.

There’s a noise from the engine compartment. He looks inside, and finds Jyn climbing out of the upper maintenance panel, a space he would not have believed she could fit inside. Bodhi offers his hand and she takes it, drops to the deck, and puts her arms around him. He lets the tension drain away as he holds her. He hasn’t had any stims on this run, and he is suddenly very tired.

They sit back to back on the shuttle’s bench. Bodhi’s right hand brushes Jyn’s left. “Will you get in trouble?” she asks. “For returning late?”

He shakes his head. “My flight instructor always stops on the way back. What did Chirrut say to you?”

“He said he’ll find me. The Force brought us together once. It will do it again.”

For one blazing moment, Bodhi is furious with Chirrut. How can he say such a thing, give her that idea to cling to? “The galaxy is big,” he hedges.

He feels Jyn nod. Maybe she doesn’t believe Chirrut either. Or maybe she does, and she’s trying to seem mature. He regrets saying anything, and searches for a way to lift the mood.

“I remember when you had a lisp like a leaky coolant system,” he tells her. “Your front teeth mangled everything.” She stumbled over his name then, too; the first syllable leaked into the third. _Bodhi Roke_.

Jyn’s elbow lands sharp under his ribs. Bodhi grunts. She fires back, “I remember when you were too scrawny to load a cargo crate by yourself. Oh, wait, that was today.”

“Loading’s not my job,” he protests. He feels her laugh. “Harpy spawn.”

“Bilj-drinking sandworm,” she answers immediately, with fondness. “Did you ever figure out if you like girls?”

“What are girls?” He can almost hear her eyes roll. “I like one girl.”

Jyn goes still, warm at his back.

“Come with me,” she says, so soft that he isn’t sure at first that he heard her correctly. “Someone will buy the shuttle. Take whatever they offer, and we’ll disappear.”

Bodhi lets the silence hang, though it aches. She knows why he can’t.

“I couldn’t leave without asking, at least,” she says a minute later. She clasps her fingers with his.

He takes a breath. “I know.”

The Sunset Prayer comes to mind. He recites it, softly, and she joins him. Shortly after he says “The Force is eternal,” something occurs to him. He spits a curse. Jyn shifts. “There’ll be cams in the spaceport when we land,” he says, running his free hand over his face. It’s not an Imperial world, but the spaceport would turn over the records if the Empire asked. Stupid, stupid. A rookie mistake, an oversight that stands to get them both killed. What a feckless smuggler he is.

Jyn is silent for a long time. “Is the ‘fresher tank in this thing standard?”

“Um. Yes?”

“Jettison it,” Jyn says, leaning away from him. Bodhi furrows his brow, but he goes to the ‘fresher and does as he’s told, activating the mid-jump waste disposal and tank cleaning cycle.

Jyn steps past him and takes something slender and black from inside her vest, thumbs a release on it, snaps it down at her side. It extends to forearm length: a truncheon. Jyn smashes it into the side of the tank. The impact thunders in the tiny space. She hits the same spot twice more, and then straightens and stares evenly at Bodhi.

“Looks like you’ve got a tank rupture.”

Bodhi takes his hands off his ears. “That’s a disgusting place to hide.”

Jyn shrugs, collapses the truncheon, puts it away. “It’s sanitized. Do you have a better way to get off this ship without being seen?”

He doesn’t. He doesn’t even have a coat long enough to hide her under. He has to admit this is a solid plan, unlikely to draw attention. “Kriff, Jyn, I have to pee.”

Her nonchalant expression breaks into a rueful smile. “You can go after you push me out with the rest of the garbage.”

“Is this a Partisan skillset?”

“It’s going to work.” And then Jyn turns serious. “I only ever went on raids outside the city,” she says, holding his gaze. “Just the convoys that fed the remote bases, and the shipments coming back from the mines. I want you to know that. I couldn’t talk Saw out of anything, but I didn’t go along those days.”

Bodhi allows himself half a second of uncharitable thought. She’s telling him this to shield herself. It’s as effective as, _Who, me? I’m not Imperial. I just deliver their supplies._ She didn’t stay off the city raids because she cared about the city, but because she was afraid of what he’d think.

She stayed off the city raids because she cared about what he’d think.

He crushes her to him, wraps his arms too tight around her--and lets go an instant later, before he can start crying. “I need to log the damage,” he says. He goes up to the cockpit without looking back.

He sits at the console, grips the armrest with one hand and uses the heel of the other hand to scrub at his eyes.

It’s not that he’s afraid to let her see him cry. (How many times has he seen her cry?) It’s that it’s too late. She has to know what she means to him. If she doesn’t know by now, there’s no point in showing her just before she’s gone forever. He can save them both the hurt. Or, at least, save it all for himself.

When he can see clearly again, he calls up the flight log and enters, _Waste tank rupture, possibly from pressure imbalances. Stopping on Abregado-rae for a replacement. Recommend inspection of refresher fluidics system at next maintenance._

Jyn is on the bench when he comes back down the ladder. Bodhi sits on the deck with his back to her. After a few breaths Jyn’s hands go to his hair, tug at it gently. Bodhi leans his head back and lets her pull the tie out. She combs her fingers through.

He’s out of things to say and, for once, so is she. When she finishes with his hair it’s up like hers, a neat little bun. She smiles down at him.

The navcomp’s proximity alert sounds the two minute warning. Bodhi pushes all the air out of his lungs. Jyn gets up and offers her hand. He takes it, and she yanks him to his feet.

Together, they uncouple the busted tank and put it on a repulsorcart. At the edge of the ramp they lock it in place with the magbrakes. Jyn lifts the top panel’s seal and starts to climb inside.

“Hey,” Bodhi says, because _I’ll miss you_ is lodged in his chest and won’t come out, and _Goodbye_ feels like a lie. (Maybe Chirrut’s hope has infected him as well.) “What if I’m too scrawny to push this thing out by myself?” He tries a smile; it’s unsteady.

Jyn searches his face. “You’re stronger than you look,” she says. Then she stoops down and pulls the panel into place.

Bodhi climbs to the cockpit and reverts to realspace in the Abregado system. On his approach he requests a replacement waste tank, billable to the Imperial Intersystem Transit Bureau.

Upon landing he looks out the viewport at the cams, notes the angles and blind spots. The new tank is waiting by the bay blast shield, with no one present to help him install it. Bodhi fills his lungs, empties them again. This is not a trap. He will not be met with a garrison. It’s going to work.

Between lowering the ramp and releasing the magbrakes, he gives the side of the old tank a gentle double-tap. Jyn makes no response. He pushes the tank down the ramp and into place near the exit, in a corner the cams don’t cover. He pulls the repulsorcart out from underneath it, easing it edge-first onto the permacrete. He turns, and keeps his eyes forward.

Bodhi struggles with the new empty tank, despite its lightness. Makes it look good for the cams. Back on board, he closes the ramp and installs the tank. He was planning to stay a while, lose a few hundred credits on a race as a cover. Jyn gave him a cover he’d never consider--destruction of property isn’t really his style.

And it means he can leave now.

He gets departure clearance from control and speeds through the preflight sequence. When he pulls away, he flares the thrusters just a hair over planetary liftoff regulation, enough for the engine wash to stir the dust and flimsiplast detritus at the edge of the bay. Enough to rattle the sides of the tank. And then Abregado-rae Spaceport dwindles beneath him, and when he’s out of atmo Bodhi calculates the jump home and sends the shuttle into hyperspace.

He tries to doze, but when he lets his mind drift he keeps thinking maybe Jyn climbed back out when he made the approach to Abregado-rae. Maybe she stayed. He doesn’t let himself get up and check the engine compartment.

Even when she went to live with Saw, at least he still knew where she was. Is it any wonder Chirrut and Baze cling so tightly to each other?

The moment he lowers the ramp back in the east depot, Misurno swaggers aboard. “Here he is! Any trouble out there?”

Bodhi shrugs down the ladder at him. “Minor rupture in the ‘fresher, but I got a replacement tank.”

“Stinks to be you, Rook,” Misurno says, and laughs at his own joke. He climbs up to the cockpit and scrolls through the log. He smells of liquor, as ever. “Well done, Ensign. You look beat. Take some rest.”

The city is waking up; Bodhi passes miners on their way to the lifts. He feels like he was gone a week, like the city should look different somehow. How strange it is that a person can vanish from someone else’s life in a single night.

There is a steady familiar intonation somewhere up ahead. “May the Force of others be with you.” The clink of coins in a dish. “May the Force of others be with you.”

Bodhi fishes a couple credits out of his vest. He scans the archways near Chirrut’s spot. Baze stands guard a handful of meters away. Baze sees him, and pretends not to.

When Bodhi drops the coins into the bowl, Chirrut’s hand closes around his wrist and squeezes once.

“May the Force of others be with you,” he says without change in inflection.

He lets go, and Bodhi looks back as he walks on.


	7. Trust

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> For the second time that evening, and the hundredth time since they met, Galen considers Bodhi carefully. “Quiet subversion and keeping your head down is all well and good,” he says, “but in order to make a real difference, there comes a time when you have to stand up.”
> 
> Bodhi’s jaw clenches. He isn’t sure what irritates him more--how close to the mark Galen just hit, or how much he sounds like Jyn.
> 
> “Do you have regrets, Bodhi?”
> 
> He shuts his eyes. “Yes.”
> 
> “If I were strong, I’d be doing this myself. I’m not strong, and I regret that.” Galen’s voice, still gentle, takes on a new urgency. “This is the only way I know to make it right. You can make it right.”
> 
> Bodhi takes a breath, opens his eyes, and closes his hand around the chip.
> 
> Galen’s hand settles, warm, over his. “Thank you.”

Bodhi is twenty-five, and Jyn, if she’s still alive, is twenty-two, and the Force has a sick sense of humor. 

Over drinks in his quarters, Galen Erso asks Bodhi to deliver a message for him. It will be dangerous, he warns as Bodhi opens his mouth to say yes automatically. “It will be treason, if you’re caught,” Galen tells him.

Bodhi hesitates. It’s not that he would stop short of treason for the sake of the one person who has treated Bodhi with anything other than professional coldness since Misurno died. It’s more that Galen wants him to feel prepared, autonomous. “What’s the message?” 

“It concerns what we’re building.” 

And finally, after three years of delivering kyber crystals to Eadu, Bodhi asks what they’re building. 

Galen tells him. Bodhi tries to wrap his mind around the vast horror of it, the idea that such a thing could even exist. It could, with a mind as brilliant as Galen’s in the Empire’s arsenal, forever thinking three steps ahead of everyone else. It could exist, and it will. 

Galen produces a chip and sets it on the table between them. “This contains information vital to the Rebellion. I need to you to find Saw Gerrera and deliver it to him. He’ll know what to do.” 

Bodhi considers the chip, and then the remnants of the brandy in his glass. He downs it in one. Galen refills it. “I know where Saw Gerrera is,” Bodhi tells him. 

“You’ve met him?” 

“The Partisans have been conducting operations on Jedha for years. He has a fortress outside of the city.” 

“And you’ve been there?” Galen presses. “He isn’t the sort to invite guests.” 

Bodhi grimaces at the understatement. “Once. It was nine years ago, but he’s still sending out raids.” 

Galen sits back from the table, the back of his hand against his mouth like he wants to hold the words inside, a calculation in his eyes. “Tell me,” he says at last, looking at his brandy and nowhere else, “was there a young girl in his care? She’d be a few years younger than you. Human. Brown hair, green eyes, pale.” 

“You’re Jyn’s father,” Bodhi says, very quiet. He isn’t sure he spoke at all, under the sound of his metric for objective truth shifting again. 

Now Galen looks up from the glass, his expression open and wondering, and Bodhi thinks he shouldn’t have said anything. 

“Scientific minds aren’t predisposed to believing in destiny,” Galen says, “but I’m hard-pressed to find another explanation for how I knew I could trust you, Bodhi Rook.” He smiles, and Bodhi returns it, with effort. “Was she… How was she?” 

“She was cared for,” Bodhi says, and that, too, is an understatement. “She left Jedha seven years ago.” 

Galen’s expression flags only slightly. “You don’t know where she is.” Bodhi shakes his head. “But Saw would.” Bodhi doubts that, but he won’t say so. Galen gestures at the chip. “Half of the message is for her.” 

“Why not send it to the Rebellion? Why Jyn?” 

“Because she’s my daughter,” Galen says, and  _ oh _ how Bodhi loathes tautologies. “If you had the chance to contact your sister, wouldn’t you?”

Bodhi snorts in the midst of taking a swig. The brandy burns his sinuses. He coughs once, and grates, “No.” 

For the second time that evening, and the hundredth time since they met, Galen considers Bodhi carefully. “Quiet subversion and keeping your head down is all well and good,” he says, “but in order to make a real difference, there comes a time when you have to stand up.” 

Bodhi’s jaw clenches. He isn’t sure what irritates him more--how close to the mark Galen just hit, or how much he sounds like Jyn. 

“Do you have regrets, Bodhi?” 

He shuts his eyes. “Yes.” 

“If I were strong, I’d be doing this myself. I’m not strong, and I regret that.” Galen’s voice, still gentle, takes on a new urgency. “This is the only way I know to make it right.  _ You _ can make it right.” 

Bodhi takes a breath, opens his eyes, and closes his hand around the chip. 

Galen’s hand settles, warm, over his. “Thank you.” 

A day later, back in NiJedha under the afternoon sun, as aware of the chip hidden in his boot as he would be of an orange coal, Bodhi pauses by the cracked wall in the Middle District. They left coded messages in the crack for each other when Bodhi grew too tall to hide there. Since they were so rarely apart, they were mostly an opportunity to criticize Jyn’s poor spelling in realtime.

He finds nothing inside the crevice, not even a small child hiding from Imperials. 

He shouldn’t be so disappointed. Nothing in life is that easy, and Jyn wouldn’t return to the city, wouldn’t come to him. He’ll have to go to her. 

Though he delays, stops by his parents’ house for tea, loiters in the Holy Quarter hoping to hear a repetitive blessing, he knows there’s nothing for it. An hour before sunset he requisitions a speeder bike. 

Bodhi doesn’t have a glowlamp to blink at the Partisan escort that rushes out to meet him, and wouldn’t know the password anyway. He waves and maintains his course and speed. They don’t open fire, which he chooses to take as a good sign. 

At the threshold of the fortress, with a dozen blaster muzzles trained on him, Bodhi parks the speeder bike and, with slow and careful motions, takes two scandocs from his flightsuit and the chip from his boot. A Tognath approaches and Bodhi holds them out. 

One scandoc is his Imperial identification; the other is Asir Mindu. He’s not sure whether reminding Saw who he is will work in his favor, but if nothing else it’s a reminder of Jyn. 

The Tognath snaps his offerings up and examines them while another shrouded henchman puts a set of binders on Bodhi’s wrists, and a third sweeps him with a scanner. 

“I need to speak to Saw,” Bodhi tells him. “I have a message from Galen Erso.” 

If this means anything to any of the Partisans, they don’t show it. The Tognath gestures, and the others crowd Bodhi into the fortress. 

Saw Gerrera’s hair has grown wild since Bodhi last saw him. There’s something wild in his eyes as well. He comes to meet them in the corridor, and the Tognath steps forward with the chip and scandocs. “That’s for you,” Bodhi calls before the Tognath can speak, “from Galen Erso.” 

Saw glances from Bodhi to the scandocs. “The principled pilot,” he remarks, and Bodhi is oddly gratified to have made that impression. As he holds the chip up to the light, Saw adds, “Tell me why I shouldn’t assume this is part of an attempt on my life.” 

Maybe because he’s principled. Bodhi shrugs, lifting his manacled wrists along with his shoulders. “Galen doesn’t want you dead. He believes you can find Jyn.” 

“Lies,” Saw barks. “Every day, more lies.” 

Bodhi wonders how many attempts there have been on Saw’s life since Jyn left. How many of the would-be assassins were local boys, sick of the raids? 

How thin is the thread between Saw Gerrera and Jedha? Does he still fancy himself the planet’s protector? 

In any event, Bodhi will burn in nine hells before he lets himself be intimidated in this place. He has seen Saw Gerrera dote on a ten-year-old girl. He has turned his back on Saw Gerrera and all the Partisans. He may shake now, but he’ll live to turn his back on them again. 

“I don’t care if you believe me,” he says. “Do you know how to reach Jyn, or not?” 

Saw fits his respirator mask into place and watches Bodhi. After a long and torturous breath he tells the others, “Find him a cell.” 

Oh. Right. Bodhi almost laughs at himself for thinking he’d be home for supper. 

He loses track of the hours in the windowless cell, but he’s slept three times and eaten six ration bars by the time the Partisans shove someone into the cell beside his. 

Bodhi has spent this time brooding, isolating the moment when Galen’s tactics changed. When he went from approaching Bodhi as a friend, a confidant, someone with the potential to be more, to speaking with a fatherly tone instead. 

The Ersos are hardly subtle. And yet, here he is. 

In the next cell there is a shuffling sound. It stops beneath the barred opening in the wall. 

“Hey,” says a voice that has a lilt to it, an accent he can’t place. “Are you the pilot?” 

Bodhi peers at the man’s face. He’s unshaven, serious, and tired. “Did the Rebellion send you?” Bodhi asks, unsure where to put the emphasis in that sentence. 

“That’s right.” The man’s smile sits uneasily on his face. 

Bodhi manages to hold back a bitter laugh. Whatever Saw Gerrera advertised about him, the Rebellion didn’t think it was important enough to send more than one agent.

The man takes a breath to repeat his question, and Bodhi lifts a hand, turns his head away. “I brought the message. I’m the pilot.” 

“I’m Cassian. Listen, you just stay calm.” If Bodhi were any more calm, he’d be asleep. He’s just about come to terms with the inevitability of rotting in this cell. “ I’m going to get us--”

The words  _ out of here _ die unspoken as the Tognath approaches and enters the unlock code for Bodhi’s cell. Bodhi spares the rebel a glance as he’s escorted out, and resists the urge to wish him luck. 

In a dim vestibule, the red of Chirrut’s half-robe and Baze’s collar stand out. Bodhi shouldn’t be surprised to see them there, but he is. “You’re worth six hundred credits to the Empire,” Baze says by way of greeting. 

Bodhi is almost insulted--but that also means the Empire doesn’t know the specifics of what he brought. “Is that why you’re here?” 

Baze doesn’t blink. Chirrut lifts his stick toward the archway before them. “We’re here with her,” he says. 

The Tognath shoves him before he has time to process this. Bodhi stumbles through the door and into the middle of an argument. 

“You  _ dumped _ me,” Jyn shouts, half lunging at Saw. And then she turns at the sound of Bodhi’s footsteps, and the rage and hurt on her face melts away. She says his name. 

She’s changed so little. She’s a hair taller; her face is harder, her eyes sadder. Seeing her now is a change in the wind, a cloud over the mesa heavy with the promise of rain. Still, he’s conscious of Saw in the room, and he keeps his voice and expression cool. “Hi, Jyn.” 

She looks him over, looks back at Saw. “What did you do to him?” 

Saw raises his hands. “Nothing. I knew you’d want him unharmed.” 

He’s worth more than six hundred credits to someone. 

Saw shows her the chip. “This is the message I was sent.” 

Jyn turns toward the projector and Bodhi watches Galen flicker to life and speak. His image faces away from Bodhi. Beyond Galen’s right shoulder, out the round window with its broken lattice, Bodhi can see the mesa. 

As Jyn circles the image of her father, Bodhi follows and then passes her, drawn to the window. There is nothing in the sky above the city. 

What did the Rebellion do? What did Jyn do? 

Bodhi fills his lungs; it feels like the first time in ten years he’s breathed that deep. There is nothing in the sky above the city, the Star Destroyer is gone, Jedha is free, and the mesa is  _ so _ beautiful--

The sky darkens, the sun crescents. 

There is no time to comprehend what’s happening. A green spear descends. Bodhi shuts his eyes against the searing light, and when he opens them again, a ball of flame grows where the city was. 

He presses his hand over his mouth to hold back a cry. The fortress trembles. The groan of the earth’s protest is all he hears. Saw is beside him at the window and Bodhi staggers back, nearly trips over Jyn. 

The rebel, Cassian, dashes into the room, blaster halfway out of its holster. Whatever he says to Jyn, it gets her on her feet. She grabs Bodhi’s hand and then digs her feet in, turns back for Saw. 

Saw tells her to go. They go. 

Outside, ahead of a colossal tidal wave of stone and sand, a ship, a U-wing, streaks toward them. The Guardians are already running, Chirrut’s hand on Baze’s elbow. Cassian has let go but Jyn still has Bodhi’s fingers locked in hers, and she pulls when he wants to stop and stare, to spend a morbid minute trying to recognize pieces of the city in the oncoming wall. She’s shouting at him but the thunder is in his bones now and he will never be rid of this baritone tinnitus. 

He lets her lead him. She pulls him into the U-wing. Cassian lifts off and Bodhi and Jyn press up against the viewport. The wave rolls on, taking the fortress and the nearest mesa with it. It arcs and folds back on itself, over them, swallowing them. 

Starlines streak past the ship, an instant before annihilation. Too close. 

Bodhi turns away from the viewport, leans against Jyn, unfathomably weary. In hyperspace, the sound of Jedha’s destruction fades. The next thing he hears is Chirrut, asking Baze if the whole city is gone. 

“All of it,” Baze says.

Chirrut tilts his head, listening at different angles until he finds Bodhi and Jyn by their breath. “It would be good to pray,” he suggests. 

There’s dust in Bodhi’s throat, and years of silence on this topic, but he can’t deny Chirrut this, not now. Without Baze’s voice they adapt: Bodhi echoes Chirrut, and Jyn echoes Bodhi.

The Force is with me and   
                    The Force is with me and  
                                        The Force is with me and  
                                                            I am one with the Force   
                                                                           I am one with the Force  
                                                                                          I am one with the Force

And I fear nothing for  
                And I fear nothing for  
                                And I fear nothing for  
                                                All is as the Force wills it  
                                                             All is as the Force wills it  
                                                                          All is as the Force wills it

Bodhi interrupts before the prayer can cycle again. “I brought them what they needed, to do this. I gave it to them.”

“You didn’t have a choice,” Jyn says at his back. 

Didn’t he? “I could have refused. I could have resisted more.” All the little things, the way he botched his starfighter admission exams, the way he gambled away his wages, the way he left the insignias on his flightsuit to fade and scuff, all the ways he tried to stay Jedhan, they amount to nothing against this monstrosity. He collaborated. 

“No.” Jyn gets up without warning, and Bodhi grabs the back of the jumpseat to keep from falling over. She moves to sit in front of him and her gaze bores into his. “You had _things to lose_ , remember?” 

“They’re all lost now,” he says, bitterness twisting his mouth. “What do you think they would have preferred?” 

Jyn shakes her head. “That isn’t the decision you were making. The Empire was always going to do this, and your family would want you alive and fighting.” She’s so calm and rational about it. Force help him--she sounds like he would, on any other day. “So that’s what we’ll do,” she goes on. “We’ll find my father, wherever he is, and then we’ll make them pay. We’ll set it right.” And now she sounds like Galen. 

“He was on Eadu,” Bodhi says. He regrets it at once, because Jyn’s expression starts to bloom exactly like Galen’s did when Bodhi said her name. 

“You met him? You talked to him?” 

“That was last week,” he says. He can’t be responsible for her hopes, not if something’s happened. “They could have stationed him somewhere else. They could have found out--” It’s not working. Her eyes are wide and there’s something like a smile growing on her face. 

Cassian has overheard. He crosses the cabin to join them. “You know how to make an approach so we won’t be spotted?” 

“Yes, but I’m saying he might not even be there anymore. Shouldn’t we take some time to regroup and, I don’t know, check your intel?” 

“Time is not one of our resources,” says Cassian, and Bodhi can’t help but see his point. “Even if he’s not there, it’s a start.” He gives them both a smile, more with his eyes than his mouth, and goes to the comm station. 

Jyn blinks after him, her face still full of wild optimism, and then she glances back at Bodhi, and quickly away again. “What is it?” he asks. 

She shakes her head, and he angles to look at her directly. She says, “My mother had brown eyes.” 

Bodhi stares after Cassian, and understands. “I should go help with navigation.”

He shouldn’t. He should stay, because having her beside him is as much a comfort as the prayer was for Chirrut. But at the same time he has to be alone, to grieve and to grapple with the fact that he  _ is _ alone now.

That’s a lie--there’s no such thing as alone on this tiny ship. Bodhi gets up, and tells himself it’s not because of the spike of petulant jealousy that has taken up residence in his chest. 


	8. Objective Truth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He regrets the moment Cassian snaps, “Anyone else?” and Jyn looks to Bodhi, and Bodhi says nothing, and he can see the word coward in her eyes.
> 
> He can’t begrudge her. He came back down the ridge when Cassian told him to. Did Bodhi really care about Galen more than Galen cared about him, in the end?
> 
> When he turns away from the comm station after calling in the transponder code so they won’t be shot down over Yavin IV, Jyn is gone. Bodhi goes to the engine compartment.
> 
> He pries the maintenance panel away, quietly, and behind it Jyn’s head is bowed to fit in the cabinet and her knees are up to her ears and she looks at him and says, voice shaking, “It’s not small enough.”

Galen asked Bodhi if he had regrets. Over the next several hours, his list grows. 

He regrets that he never got his ami’s recipe for fringi. He helped her fix supper in the evenings, but when she made fringi he was out with Jyn and Chirrut and Baze. How long did she stir the glaze? How much veru was the right amount to burn just a little at the back of the throat? 

He could spend the rest of his life, however long that may be, trying to perfect the proportions his nani handed down to her. These things are lost, and how much greater is the loss of Tahirih Rook? At least if he knew, he’d have one more way to remember her. 

He regrets asking K-2SO how long ago he was reprogrammed. It’s only that the hyperlanes have shifted in the past few years, and whatever routes he may have known probably aren’t current. The droid turns to him, his photoreceptors and posture somehow conveying the offensively personal nature of the question, and asks Bodhi how long ago  _ he _ was reprogrammed. 

That’s… fair. 

He regrets how the descent to Eadu’s surface ends. And, when Jyn’s stubbornness and Cassian’s irritation start to clash, he almost immediately regrets saying, “Jyn, just stay with the ship, all right?” 

Jyn gapes at him. Baze’s eyebrows rocket toward the ceiling. Chirrut is stonefaced. 

A moment later Jyn closes her mouth and gives him a tight nod. 

He comes to regret leading Cassian up the ridge. When he gets back to the ship he finds his dread well placed. “Oh,” says K-2SO, now alone on the U-wing. “She didn’t listen to you. Surprise.” 

But Chirrut and Baze are with her, which means she’ll be safe enough, so he forces himself to focus on unloading the U-wing and stealing a shuttle and mowing down the stormtroopers who pursue her and Cassian. 

There was nothing he could have done differently, and that only makes the regret sharper. 

He regrets the moment Cassian snaps, “Anyone else?” and Jyn looks to Bodhi, and Bodhi says nothing, and he can see the word  _ coward _ in her eyes. 

He can’t begrudge her. He came back down the ridge when Cassian told him to. Did Bodhi really care about Galen more than Galen cared about him, in the end? 

When he turns away from the comm station after calling in the transponder code so they won’t be shot down over Yavin IV, Jyn is gone. Bodhi goes to the engine compartment. 

He pries the maintenance panel away, quietly, and behind it Jyn’s head is bowed to fit in the cabinet and her knees are up to her ears and she looks at him and says, voice shaking, “It’s not small enough.” 

He offers his hand and Jyn takes it and inches forward until her feet dangle out and she can drop down. “Not small enough,” she says again. “I’m not--” Her expression crumbles, and she bends at the waist like she’s been hit. 

Bodhi gets his arms around her and, awkwardly, eases both of them down to the deck. He gathers her into his lap, folds her legs up, tucks her head under his chin, wraps his arms tight. “How’s that?” he whispers. “Small enough?” 

She nods, infinitesimally. Bodhi takes a deep breath in, and lets it out forcefully enough to stir her wet hair. He leans back against the bulkhead. They won’t reach Yavin IV for a few more hours, and he has no plans to move.

“The Force is with me,” he says, softly so they won’t hear out in the cabin, but voiced so she’ll feel it in his chest, “and I am one with the Force. The Force is with me and I am one with the Force. The Force is--” A lump forms in his throat and he can’t anymore. He’s holding her too hard now, fingers clutching the back of her vest, but she doesn’t fight that. The whole city… not the whole world, probably, but his world, the parts that mattered, everything he was going to fight for. 

Jyn turns in his grasp, snakes an arm loose and wraps it around him. “When things went bad, the last seven years, I used to think it was because we weren’t together.” 

He can’t help himself. “Well, now that we are, things are going really well.” 

She puts her face against his shoulder, and he can’t tell if she’s sobbing again, or hysterical instead. Bodhi digs his fingers into her hair. Regret turns to resentment--toward the Rebellion, toward Cassian, even toward Galen, for upsetting all their lives and for building that horror in the first place. What comes out instead, when he sighs, is, “Why do you have to be in the middle of everything?”

Jyn lifts her head to glare at him. “I came back to Jedha because the Rebellion told me Saw had you.” 

Bodhi hopes she can’t hear his heart turning over. “That isn’t the only reason.” 

“Did you think of me at all?” 

He is sincere when he says, “Every day.” 

Every day he regretted staying. How strange to regret something that was the right choice, the only choice. On long jumps with nothing but an audiodidact library of galactic history to occupy him, he conjured up a dozen different lives for them on a dozen different worlds. 

Jyn settles her head back on his chest. “I came back,” she repeats, proving something to herself as much as him. 

Bodhi nods. When he closes his eyes he sees his front stoop at sunset, tastes powdered veru at the back of his throat. 

Jyn is silent for several breaths. When she speaks again, her voice is soft, deceptively casual. “My mother chose to die instead of staying with me.” 

“No.” He cranes his neck to look her in the eyes. “You  _ said _ she died when she shot the man in white. Remember? That’s what you told me.” It’s like all the times he caught inconsistencies in her stories, only now it feels like life or death. If they’re going to get those bastards back, make them pay, she can’t be stranded in self-pity. Neither can he. “She wasn’t running from you. She did something important.” 

Jyn considers him, and nods once. 

The Empire’s grip on the galaxy is such that it requires human sacrifice to cause a mild inconvenience. Bodhi is willing to do his part. 

The Rebellion is not. 

In the base’s command center on Yavin IV he is discussed and dismissed as if he isn’t present, as if the Alliance isn’t built on the foundation of Imperial defectors, as if the senators around the table aren’t still serving the Empire’s purposes every day. 

He lets Jyn do the talking because she, for once, is eloquent and comparatively restrained; she doesn’t insult anyone, in fact. Perhaps she’s finally lost enough to grow up, to discover a side of herself that that doesn’t try to solve every problem by hitting it. 

He swallows rage at the talk of surrender. What is the point of them? Their fleet, their ground troops? Why would they go just far enough to attack the research facility, to kill Galen, but no further? If any of them were Jedhan, if any of them witnessed it, they’d put on tactical gear and dash themselves against the Empire until it or the Rebellion was gone. 

The rage follows him out when Jyn leaves in defeat. Baze looks them over, but Chirrut already knows. “She wants to fight.” 

“So do I,” Bodhi says, and he almost regrets that he didn’t join the Partisans, because at least then he would know  _ how _ to fight, what to do next. 

It’s Cassian who solves that problem, and Bodhi watches Jyn’s posture change at the sight of him and all those troops. He hears Cassian say, “Welcome home.” 

He goes to prep the shuttle. 

Jyn carries a bag of gear up the ladder while Bodhi is spooling up the engines. K-2 follows her, settling into the copilot’s seat. “Here,” Jyn says, tossing something brown at Bodhi. He shakes it out: a utility vest, brimming with pockets. “If we get separated, you’ll need your comm on you.”

“Are you going somewhere without me?” In the midst of all this talk of hope, Bodhi is trying to be pragmatic. The most he allows himself to hope for is that they’ll die together. 

Jyn watches him for a long time. “When we’re in hyperspace I’ll need your help with the plan.” 

She doesn’t actually have one yet. That bodes well. “All right,” Bodhi says, and then the flight officer comes on the comm, and a moment later their ship has a name. 

It’s not a bad one, either. In contrast to the cold, crushing names the Empire gives the ships it deems worthy,  _ Rogue One _ feels fierce on his tongue. Perhaps, just as the past few days have gifted Jyn with a sense of diplomacy, he now has the ability to think on the fly. 

Once they’re in hyperspace Jyn goes below and returns with Cassian. “You’ve been to Scarif?” Cassian says. 

“A few times.” 

“What can we expect down there?” 

He tells them: security is tight and all ships are inspected upon landing, but the garrison and squadron are relatively small once they’re past the planetary shield gate. Landing pads are linked to the Citadel Tower by ground rail, and Cassian brightens at that, asks how far.  

“A kilometer, maybe.” 

“Good. Melshi and the rest will plant charges and create a distraction, and then track down the generator for the planetary shield. Jyn, K-2, and I will infiltrate the archives.” 

Something about this itches at Bodhi’s brain, and he can’t sort out why it bothers him. He glances to K-2SO, who has listened so far without comment, then turns to Jyn. “Why did it have to be you?” 

For half a second she looks offended, but she overcomes it quickly. “Because I’m Galen Erso’s daughter.” 

“What did the message say?” he specifies, forcing himself to be patient. 

“You were there.” 

“I was distracted.” Bodhi runs a hand over his face, conscious of Cassian watching them bicker like siblings. “What did he say to you on Eadu?” 

Her face goes still. “Leave it,” Cassian says, not unkindly. 

“I’m not trying to dredge anything--” 

“Does it matter?” Cassian interrupts. “We’re all here. We’re the only ones who are going to do anything about it, so let’s leave the whys for when the job is done, okay?” 

If they’re still alive. It’s not the most stirring of speeches, but he’s right. Bodhi looks from Cassian to Jyn, who seems to be very far away. “Okay,” he says. 

“When we have the plans, we regroup on the ship and get out. Expect us to have a tail. Keep the engines hot.” 

“I’m the only one who needs to go in,” Jyn says abruptly. 

“Don’t be stupid,” Bodhi says, at the same instant Cassian tells her that’s not an option. 

“No one else has to be in that much danger.”

“You’re not going by yourself,” Cassian says.

“You don’t trust me to finish this,” Jyn accuses.

“Yes I do,” Cassian says, gently, and the look they share makes Bodhi turn away. “K-2 and I are going with you.” 

“Don’t do this alone,” Bodhi says, still not facing her. He feels Jyn watching him. Maybe she won’t listen to him again. Lyra Erso died for something important too. What’s the truth: that this will cost more than they can bear, or that rebellion and hope demand it? They may not be mutually exclusive, but in that moment he can’t reconcile them. 

Jyn’s hand settles over his. “Okay,” she says. 

After they land, after Bodhi baits the inspection team into the lower hold, Jyn comes up wearing the uniform of a security officer, all severe black. She is on her way out and Bodhi brushes shoulders with her, his Imperial insignia against hers. Jyn lets a trace of mirth into her eyes, and then she’s out of the crowded hold and down the ramp with Cassian and K-2, and the shuttle empties around him. 

Bodhi already regrets not going with her. 


	9. Contemplanys IV

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bodhi steps inside and mirrors Chirrut, cross-legged on the floor. “Can I ask you something?”
> 
> “Of course,” Chirrut says.
> 
> He struggles to form the sentence, and it still comes out before he’s ready. “Do the Guardians have rules about… physical…”
> 
> Baze starts to laugh. “Let him finish,” Chirrut chides.
> 
> “Attachments,” Bodhi says. “Affections.” The Jedi did. Maybe that was part of their mistake.
> 
> “The Force delights in lovemaking,” Chirrut says lightly.
> 
> That is substantially more on the topic than Bodhi ever wanted to hear from Chirrut, so he says, “Great, that’s all I needed to--”
> 
> “What the Force cannot abide,” Chirrut continues, “is jealousy.”
> 
> Bodhi looks down at his hands.

Once, on a mat on a rooftop south of the marketplace in a city that doesn’t exist anymore, Bodhi considered the kyber crystal Jyn held in the sun’s last light. “Why did the Sith have red lightsabers?” he asked. Jyn’s crystal gleamed white regardless of what sort of light shone through it, unlike the prisms and fiberoptics Bodhi studied in school.

“They made the crystals bleed,” Chirrut answered.

Bodhi looked to Baze, at rest with his head on Chirrut’s lap, but Baze only closed his eyes and raised his brows. Bodhi assumed just existing required a great deal of exertion when one was that tall, and that was why Baze relied on such small motions, shrugging with his face instead of his shoulders, twitching his ears to get Jyn to laugh.

“Then why did the Jedi have blue lightsabers, or green, or gold, or purple?” Bodhi pressed.

“Water,” Jyn said, turning the crystal in her fingers. “Growing things. Cleansing light. Royalty.”

He didn’t want free association or more lazy metaphors. He wanted _reasons_. Water could drown, rot could be green, light could sear, and power could corrupt. Somehow, Jedi and Sith alike changed something that could not be burned or hammered. “Where did they go wrong?”

“They trusted their own judgment above the Force,” Baze declared. “They did not allow themselves to be led. They were stubborn. Much like Chirrut.” Chirrut smiled, unoffended.

“I’m not joking,” Bodhi protested.

“Neither am I. Don’t ever think you know what the Force wants before you ask it, Bodhi Rook.”

Now, in a shuttle named _Rogue One_ , a kilometer away from the Citadel Tower, Bodhi listens to the comms chatter. The more troops the Empire sends out, the more of a fiasco this becomes, the closer they are to the inevitable: a sphere blotting the sun once again, an unimaginably large kyber crystal bleeding green, turning beaches to glass.

He grabs the shuttle’s transmitter and diverts the defensive garrison to pad two. Orders Tonc to do the same. Tonc’s urgency is convincing, possibly because he isn’t acting at all.

Bodhi’s fingers itch to be airborne. On the pad they’re much too exposed, ramp open and waiting for someone to realize they weren’t calling from pads two and five. But if he pulls away, Jyn won’t be able to find him if she comes back. _When_ she comes back.

He wants to get out of this, but he won’t make the mistake of convincing himself the Force wants that too. He is not its favorite child. If the Force has one, someone it will allow out of any scrape, it’s--

His commlink crackles in his vest pocket. “Bodhi?”

He nearly drops it in his rush to answer. “Jyn?”

“We have them. We have the plans.”

“Go now.”

“The repulsor rail isn’t an option. We’ll have to meet you outside.”

“Keep talking. I’ll lock onto your signal. I’ll find you.” That’s something the Empire can do too, but they’ll deal with that if they have to. He tells Tonc to strap in. He closes the ramp and fires up the repulsors. Outside, a security officer shouts.

“You were right,” Jyn says into the comm. She’s panting. There’s blasterfire in the background. “There was a reason it had to be me.”

He doesn’t like the past tense in that statement, doesn’t like how resigned she sounds. He lifts off the pad even as a stormtrooper sets up an E-Web. “Of course I was right,” he says, just to hear her laugh.

K-2 cuts in. “The Rebel fleet has arrived.”

Bodhi looks up reflexively. It’s daylight and he can’t see the ships, but he can make out the shield gate, sliding closed.

Damn.

He is not the Force’s favorite child and it may not want him to get out of this, but he’s going to try until the Force says no.

“We’re out,” Jyn shouts. “They have walkers.”

And _Rogue One_ has cannons, and Tonc is a good shot. And the shield gate is closed, and they’re gnats trapped under a bowl, short lives growing ever shorter. _I am one with the Force and the Force is with me_. He casts about for options.

An X-wing--blue striped, one of the ones that killed Galen?--streaks past them and takes down an AT-ACT. If they still have ships active under the shield, the Rebellion won’t leave them down here. As the signal tracer dials down, he fumbles with the shuttle’s comm, switching off the base security channel and onto the nearest open frequency. “Blue… Leader? Blue Leader, do you copy?”

“This is Blue Leader,” comes the reply, strained.

“Blue Leader, this is _Rogue One_. The mission objective is in hand. We are retrieving our people. Can you contact the fleet?”

“Negative, _Rogue One_. Alliance channels are jammed.”

Bodhi slams his hand on a bare part of the console, winces. “Cover us, Blue Leader.”

If the pilot is irritated at the order, he’s too professional to let it into his voice. “Copy that, _Rogue One_.”

There is a trench at the water’s edge, the sort of thing a child would dig to hold back the sea. It bristles with Pathfinders and rifles. Baze is there, grenade launcher on his shoulder. Chirrut crouches beside him, adjusting the range on his lightbow.

Jyn stands in the repulsor wash, heedless of the blaster bolts from the treeline, and hoists Cassian, whose right arm is tucked tight across his torso, beside her. An unwieldy datatape swings from her left hand. She runs for the ramp, shouts to the others. K-2 lopes behind her. Tonc goes below to get them aboard.

Blue Leader strafes the beach, toppling trees, buying them seconds. Bodhi looks up at the shield gate. He wouldn’t call it a plan so much as a last feeble hope. They built the gate to keep things out, but on the Scarif side, it’s undefended. One X-wing and a cargo shuttle might be enough.

“Go, go!” Tonc shouts, and Bodhi does, aiming straight for the gate and burning the thrusters hard. Force help anyone who isn’t strapped in below.

Blue Leader matches his speed. They’re still two minutes from the gate when Jyn pulls herself against extra gravity and drops into the copilot’s seat.

Bodhi steals a glance at her. She’s caked with sand and sea-spray, bleeding from half a dozen cuts, wild-eyed, and alive. She sets the tape in her lap and grips the firing sticks. “Where do I shoot?”

“I don’t think it matters.” A wave of elation breaks over him and he grins at her. They’re going to make it, or they’re not, but they’re together.

Jyn understands completely, and grins back. She turns to get a target lock, and the expression slides off her face. “Kriff.”

“I don’t know about you, _Rogue One_ ,” says Blue Leader, “but I’ve never seen anything that beautiful.”

Bodhi looks.

How many times in the last fifteen years has he longed to see a Star Destroyer fall out of the sky?

The pale dagger shape shears through the shield gate. The shield shimmers, flickers, and dies. Bodhi blinks back tears. “Affirmative, Blue Leader.” They ought to maximize the chances of the plans reaching the Alliance. He turns to Jyn, but she’s already putting the tape cartridge into the console. “Transmitting the plans now.”

“ _Profundity_ ,” says Blue Leader, “I’d like to introduce you to _Rogue One_.” He peels away to pick off their pursuit, and one wing of Gold Squadron descends to assist him.

“This is Admiral Raddus aboard the _Profundity_. We’re receiving your transmission. Well done, _Rogue One_.”

Bodhi leans back. “Thank you, Admiral.”

“When you finish the transfer, I suggest you make the jump to lightspeed. You seem to be very popular.”

Bodhi hadn’t thought beyond the gate. “Yes, yes sir.” He reaches for the navcomp and starts the calculations for a multi-stage jump to Yavin IV.

“Transfer complete,” Jyn reports.

“May the Force be with you, _Rogue One_.”

Bodhi orients the shuttle for the jump, just in time to see Scarif gain a new artificial moon. The sight is enough to make him shake, but then the stars stretch and melt together beyond the viewscreen and they are away, they are safe, and when Bodhi looks at Jyn she is watching him with a wondering smile.

“We’re on the most wanted ship in the galaxy,” she breathes.

A grin creeps onto his face again. “It’s nice to be wanted,” he says.

Jyn gets out of her seat, and onto his. Bodhi looks up into her eyes, questioning for one foolish moment whether this is the time.

Of course it is.

Jyn presses her lips to his. She smells like the sea. He wants to drown.

There is a shout from below. As quickly as she climbed on top of him she climbs off, rushes to the ladder and stoops to look down. “Get the medkit,” she tells Bodhi, and then she drops down the ladder with just her hands on the outer rails.

Bodhi stares after her and waits for his synapses to catch up.

By the time he arrives in the hold with the medkit, most of the Pathfinders are standing, and Chirrut prays softly by the bulkhead. Jyn sits where Cassian collapsed on the deck, his head in her lap. K-2 stands over him, opening and closing his hands with a lostness that is so very human, like he wants to do something, anything, but he’s afraid of causing more damage.

Melshi waves Bodhi over and takes the medkit, pulls Cassian’s shirt up to expose blaster burns and the beginning of a massive bruise, and goes to work with the electric pads.

Bodhi retreats up the ladder, away from Jyn’s stricken expression.

When they reach Yavin IV, Cassian is stable enough for K-2 to carry him out. Jyn is on her way after him when Bodhi catches up, but the square-jawed general from the Council meeting steps into their path. “You two, with me.”

“Can’t it wait?” Jyn protests.

“I know you’re new to all this, Erso, but as a rule, debriefings cannot wait.” They follow General Draven inside, not to the command center, but to a much smaller and equally dark inner room with a single durasteel table and four chairs. “Sit,” he says. Bodhi and Jyn take one side of the table, and Jyn sets the datatape down. Draven activates his datapad’s recorder module. “After your appearance before the Council, you two absconded with a dozen ground troops and a vessel that belonged to the Alliance.”

“Not true,” Bodhi interrupts, and the general’s glare, which had been reserved for Jyn, snaps over to him. “Fleet command had not processed the shuttle when we left. Technically it was still an Imperial ship.”

Beside him, Jyn’s lips twitch.

The general is silent for several breaths, appraising Bodhi. Then he proceeds as if Bodhi has not spoken. “With Captain Andor indisposed, I have no choice but to consider the two of you operational command for the purpose of this debriefing. So, in your own words and as much detail as possible: report.”

“I stayed on the ship until she called me,” Bodhi says. He folds his hands on the table and closes his mouth. The general stares at him for another long moment. Bodhi does not elaborate.

“Captain Andor and I disguised ourselves, and infiltrated the Citadel Tower with K-2SO,” Jyn says. “Melshi and the other ground troops placed charges to draw out the garrison. We proceeded to the archive and located the plans.”

“Located how?” the general says. “Don’t expect me to believe you viewed them one at a time.”

“I don’t expect you to believe anything I say,” Jyn shoots back. Bodhi’s lips twitch. “You can corroborate all of this with K-2SO. I knew what to look for when we arrived at the archive terminal. The plans were codenamed.”

“And the codename was…”

“Irrelevant to future missions or Imperial intelligence, given that my father won’t be leaving any more messages,” Jyn says smoothly. “We retrieved the plans, fled the Citadel Tower and joined the ground troops on the beach, where we were retrieved by _Rogue One_. The rest you know.”

“Did you access or transmit any additional Imperial files?”

“No,” Jyn says. “Why would we?”

“What about you?” Draven says to Bodhi. “Conscripted at age eighteen--something relevant must have crossed your path in that time.”

“I was a noncombatant,” Bodhi bites.

“Galen Erso was too,” says Draven.

Jyn rolls her shoulders. Bodhi reaches for her, stops halfway when he sees Draven observing them both. Draven lifts his chin. “Here’s what’s going to happen,” he says. “My recommendation to Senator Mothma will be neither a court martial nor the brig. Your brevet rank, Sergeant Erso, will be made official, and you, Lieutenant Rook, will be responsible for the fleet’s newest asset. When Captain Andor improves, your team will locate the Death Star and use the information you’ve retrieved to destroy it.”

“Our team?” Jyn says.

Draven is still watching Bodhi. “I believe you called it _Rogue One_?”

Bile rises in Bodhi’s throat. In the wake of this operation, the Empire will discontinue _Zeta_ -class shuttles, dismantle any enforcer droids that resemble K-2. His face and Jyn’s and Cassian’s will on every holodisplay, and Baze and Chirrut as well if they can find records from Jedha. “That’s a suicide mission,” he manages to whisper.

Draven’s expression turns smug, like a sabacc card ruining a hand. “So was the one you just returned from. You’ll be given a complement of Pathfinders. Enough to do the job.”

He talks about them, and about Cassian, like they’re hydrospanners.

“Sweep us under the rug,” Jyn mutters. “So we don’t embarrass you.”

Draven leans forward. “You cared enough about this to commandeer a ship and fly into one of the most secure Imperial installations in the galaxy. Do you care enough to see it through to the end? I guarantee you, Captain Andor does.”

Jyn’s lips curl into a sneer. “Permission to be dismissed, sir?” Bodhi cuts in before she can speak, or throw a punch.

“Granted,” Draven says.

Bodhi stands, grabs Jyn’s arm. She’s on her feet at once, stomping out beside him and leaving the plans on the table. “Go find someplace to rest,” Bodhi tells her when the door slides shut behind them.

She stares at him. “I’m going to Medical. I have to be there if he…”

“I outrank you,” Bodhi attempts, and on cue, Jyn juts her chin. He relents. “We’re both going to Medical, and you can make sure nothing’s changed, and then I’m going to stay with him and you’re going to find a cot.”

Jyn weaves a little on her feet. Her eyes soften, and she takes Bodhi’s arm.

They drift in the ziggurat’s corridors--a bewildering maze, even for two children of NiJedha--until an orange-clad pilot gives them directions. In Medical, K-2SO stands before a cylindrical tank that diffuses white light much like a kyber crystal. Cocooned inside is Cassian, and someone in the Rebellion must value him, because that much bacta would have cost a fortune on Jedha and almost any other planet outside the Core.

Jyn goes right up to the tank and squints into the blur, then examines the console that reports Cassian’s vitals. She steps back next to Bodhi.

“Okay?” he says.

“Okay,” she says, and she goes, looking back all the way out.

When she’s gone, Bodhi lets his shoulders drop. “I need some caf,” he tells K-2. The droid doesn’t acknowledge him.

In the mess hall Baze nurses a bowl of something hot. There’s no sign of Chirrut. Has he ever seen one of them without the other?

“The food is all right here,” Baze says when Bodhi approaches. Bodhi assumed they’d just be trading one kind of ration for another. Perhaps Alliance worlds have better agriculture. He isn’t hungry, but part of him wants to stay a moment. He takes a seat across from Baze. “You did well today,” Baze says.

That feels better than even the flush of accomplishment when he sent _Rogue One_ into hyperspace. Bodhi didn’t think Baze’s approval could still mean so much to him. He tamps it down. “They’re going to send us right back out there.”

“We impressed them.”

“Am I supposed to be proud of that? We did the job they wouldn’t do and now we’re their assets? We just keep fighting?”

Baze’s brow furrows. “What else are we supposed to do?”

Chirrut could establish a new temple, somewhere secluded. Baze could collect bounties; Jyn would make an excellent sidekick, especially since she actually respects Baze enough to listen to him. Bodhi…

“I don’t know,” he says, lost. “Anything.”  

Baze’s voice is gentle. “You might have done anything, had you been born any other time. Now, there are three kinds of people: Imperials, Rebels, and the ones who get tossed on the waves between them. You choose. Drown, or row.”

Bodhi tries to find something wrong with that, and comes up empty. “Where did you get those metaphors?”

Baze gives him a wounded look. “You don’t like the ocean?”

He could stand to never see one again. “So you’re rowing?”

“I’m following Chirrut. Speaking of which…” Baze finishes off the bowl and gets to his feet. “He’s probably already asleep in a corner somewhere. Get some rest, Bodhi.”

Instead, Bodhi drinks one cup of caf in the mess hall and takes a second back to Medical. Cassian has been transferred to a cot while he was away. K-2 stands there with the same posture. Bodhi would find it discomfiting to wake up after an injury and see a tall black figure with pale eyes looming before him, but that’s likely nothing new for Cassian. Bodhi brings a chair over.

Even asleep, there is a crease between Cassian’s eyebrows.

Someone is going to have to tell him, when he wakes up, and that someone can’t be General Draven. Cassian deserves the opportunity to process that without immediately having to accept it--not that he would do anything but accept it. Even if it’s just Bodhi and Jyn and K-2 in the room, they’ll be lucky to see so much as a blink before he nods grimly.

And the boat will row on. Bodhi could jump back into the waves.

He could have done anything, been anything, if he was born some other time. But the war was decades in the making. It will be decades in the unmaking, and in hundreds of systems there will be hundreds of new conflicts, which will bleed over into each other and eventually reach a galactic scale. When else could he have been born?

Jyn comes to relieve him after a few hours, tells him where to find a ‘fresher and an empty cot. He washes away the sweat, but he has nothing to change into but his own flightsuit, and no interest in going to find the quartermaster. He puts it back on and lays down, stares up at the ceiling.

Baze, like Galen, would not speak lightly of destiny. And indeed he didn’t--he spoke of resignation.

None of it is fair.

He dozes, eats in the mess hall, and goes to Medical, where Jyn is running her thumb absently over the back of Cassian’s hand. He sends her to get some sleep, and he does not hold Cassian’s hand.

They trade shifts twice more, Jyn and Bodhi splitting the day cycle, Chirrut and Baze taking over in the night. He moves through the corridors between the only duties in his life, looking up just once, when Admiral Raddus passes and says, “Lieutenant Rook.”

On the third day Bodhi stares into the middle distance and dwells on how his life would have gone if he walked back from contemplanys and went straight to the temple to become a Guardian. In a galaxy where the Empire didn’t exist, never came to the Holy City, what could the Force have made of him over the past eight years? What could Chirrut and Baze have taught him?

In a galaxy where the Empire didn’t exist, he would not have met Jyn. Without her and Chirrut and Baze, would he ever have considered the Guardians?

He’s alive. He has… if not another eight years, then some amount of time at least. He can live long enough to become something else.

Bodhi opens his eyes to see what the world looks like in the light of this revelation, and finds that Cassian is awake.

“Kay?” Cassian says, trying to lift his head.

K-2 visibly relaxes, a remarkable feat for a droid. “I’m here, Cassian.”

Cassian leans back again. His gaze settles on Bodhi. “You all right?” Bodhi nods. He can’t bring himself to deliver the news so soon, wants to let Cassian have a few moments of peace. But something must make it onto Bodhi’s face, because Cassian’s brows knit, and the machine that tracks his vitals kicks up its tempo. “Is Jyn--”

“She’s fine,” Bodhi says at once. Cassian closes his eyes and lets out a breath.

“The plans?”

“We got them out.” His droid, Jyn, the mission: Bodhi finds Cassian’s priorities unsurprising and strangely comforting. “When you’re well enough, Draven’s sending us all to destroy it.”

Cassian’s eyes turn toward the ceiling, and Bodhi wonders if there’s truly anyone who isn’t being tossed by the waves.

Before he can say anything else, Cassian’s expression shifts again--still unguarded, but just this side of a smile. Bodhi follows his gaze to the door, where Jyn stands. She looks ready to scold him for not coming to tell her Cassian was awake. She looks ready to climb onto Cassian’s cot.

She exercises restraint on both counts, joining them and taking Cassian’s hand in hers. When she sits, she takes Bodhi’s hand too.

They don’t speak for a long time. Jyn and Cassian study each other, their gazes tender enough to make Bodhi feel like an intruder. Finally he squeezes Jyn’s hand and lets go. “I need to find Chirrut,” he says, and leaves them.

He isn’t drowning, or rowing. He is letting himself be led.

Baze and Chirrut have found quarters near the barracks. Their door is open, which is how Bodhi finds them. “Took a while,” Baze observes.

“But he’s here now,” says Chirrut, smiling.  

Bodhi steps inside and mirrors Chirrut, cross-legged on the floor. “Can I ask you something?”

“Of course,” Chirrut says.

He struggles to form the sentence, and it still comes out before he’s ready. “Do the Guardians have rules about… physical…”

Baze starts to laugh. “Let him finish,” Chirrut chides.

“Attachments,” Bodhi says. “Affections.” The Jedi did. Maybe that was part of their mistake.

“The Force delights in lovemaking,” Chirrut says lightly.

That is substantially more on the topic than Bodhi ever wanted to hear from Chirrut, so he says, “Great, that’s all I needed to--”

“What the Force cannot abide,” Chirrut continues, “is jealousy.”

Bodhi looks down at his hands.

“If you go through with this, you’ll own nothing. There is no temple; you’ll have no home. You will always be on pilgrimage. Is that what you want?”

Bodhi lifts his gaze once more. “Yes.”

“You’ll need a kyber crystal,” Chirrut says, offhand, like it’s nothing to obtain one of those. “It is customary to spend some time alone in thought, before taking the vows.”

“Yes. Okay.” He gets up. “How long?”

“Until you feel ready,” Chirrut says, face tilted toward Bodhi. Baze is expressionless.

He goes to the one place at Base One where he’ll be alone. In _Rogue One_ ’s hold he shrugs out of the top half of his flightsuit, gets his multitool, and he has the little trimming blade just under the edge of the Imperial patch before he realizes he’ll need it for the mission to come.

More than that, he wonders if he can find a way to turn the flightsuit into something other than an object of shame and regret. If he’s wearing it when he becomes a Guardian, maybe he can. Chirrut certainly won’t care how he’s dressed. He folds the multitool back up and stretches out on the deck, stares at the ceiling. The durasteel is cool at his back where he’s sweated through the underlayer in the jungle air.

He has lived through the selfsame events that robbed Baze of his faith, but Bodhi believes. Perhaps it’s a product of the time to which he was born. In the Holy City there were uneti trees that grew bent around the stones, but grew nonetheless. The Empire robbed him of his home, and it still wasn’t enough. Belief can be an act of rebellion.

Belief is the only thing he has left that’s Jedhan.

The ramp clangs. Bodhi lifts his head to find Jyn entering the hold. Cassian must be asleep again. “Chirrut and Baze said you’d be here,” Jyn greets him.

Bodhi laughs, covers his face with his hands. Of course they did.

Jyn squints at him, smiling, and comes over to lay down beside him. They’re silent. Even with the ramp open, the sounds of the landing pad seem very far away. They could be the only living things for miles.

It may be too early in his career as a Guardian to have a doctrinal dispute with his mentor, but Bodhi is certain that he can be on pilgrimage and still have a home. He reaches for Jyn’s hand, which is open and waiting.

His commlink crackles. He pats at the flightsuit until finds it. “Say again, K-2?”

“Repeat, the Death Star has entered the system. It will be in firing range in fifteen minutes. I thought you should know.”

Bodhi sits up. Outside, X-wings and Y-wings pull away. He feels like they’re taking all the oxygen with them.

He thumbs the commlink. “Get Cassian to the shuttle.”

“Cassian cannot be moved.”

Jyn grabs the commlink from him. “The medics will understand, Kay.” Bodhi considers the hold. They made it to Scarif with a dozen troops; they can pack three times as many into the upper and lower holds. Chirrut and Baze, Tonc and Melshi and Pao, the base’s staff, the medical personnel.

There is a long pause, presumably for K-2 and Cassian to confer. “There is a zero percent probability that you will accomplish anything meaningful before the base is destroyed,” K-2 says at last, and cuts the connection.

Bodhi stares at Jyn. Can a droid lie? Why would he? Is Cassian that tired of running?

Maybe fifteen minutes isn’t long enough to evacuate the base, but Bodhi could take off now, make it to the far side of the gas giant and have most of a course calculated by the time--

Jyn kisses him.

The first time he was overwhelmed. Now he notices everything. Her lips are rough from worrying at them during her vigil. Her mouth is cool and tastes faintly of caf. Between his fingers her hair is damp; she must have had a sanisteam first thing that morning. Just inside the collar of her shirt, beside her pendant, her heart drums against his palm.

Jyn pulls away enough to place small kisses along his cheekbones and he is burning now; he wants all of her at once.

He lays down and Jyn climbs on top of him, a wave cresting. They move together, harmonious as a prayer.

Later, with her head on his chest, Jyn says, “It’s been longer than fifteen minutes. Do you think we won?”

He feels like they won. “Maybe we died.” He wouldn’t have noticed.

“I died twice,” Jyn says, and Bodhi grins. She lifts her head and regards him. “Someone’s going to see us here any second.”

And they’ll be very jealous. Bodhi lets her pull him to his feet, suffused with a boneless languor. They get each other dressed. Jyn leans in to kiss his jaw, his brow, his lips. Bodhi fixes the bun that’s he half undid earlier.

Outside, wreckage streaks across the noonday sky, coloring it with fire. Jyn stares up at it, then puts her hands on Bodhi’s face and kisses him fiercely. “I’ll get Chirrut and Baze,” she tells him, and goes back into the base. She’s swaggering. There’s no other word.

He watches the sky a moment longer, and as the snubfighters return, he goes to Medical.

Cassian is a good spy; he knows how to read people. He takes one look at Bodhi and schools his features into a practiced neutrality. “How does it look out there?” he asks.

“Ever fly through a nebula?” Cassian shakes his head, so instead Bodhi reaches for the sort of description Chirrut would appreciate. “It’s like painted sand, strewn across the sky,” he says, but that doesn’t do it justice.

“Stardust,” Cassian murmurs.

“What?”

“The plans,” K-2 supplies.

“I asked what Stardust was,” says Cassian, “and Jyn said it was her.”

Bodhi runs his hand over his face. He has no reason to feel jealous of this information, nor to be angry with Cassian for sharing something that wasn’t his to share, but he experiences both emotions in quick succession, and lets himself release them. All the things Jyn told him, all the minutiae of her childhood, the things he didn’t believe, and she kept that buried like a seed. It had to be her.

He’s going to devote a duan worth of prayer in gratitude for Galen Erso.

Cassian is watching him. “It’s none of my business,” he starts, and then waits for Bodhi to shut him down. When Bodhi doesn’t, he seems to be at a loss for the first time since they met.

“We don’t have much left,” Bodhi offers.

“I get it,” Cassian says. “I’ll stay out of the way.”

“I didn’t say that.” Cassian stares at him. Bodhi shrugs. “She likes you.” Perhaps it’s only the afterglow making him magnanimous, but life is short, and happiness hard-won. Why deny anyone else theirs?

A series of expressions cross Cassian’s face like clouds across the sun. After a moment he settles on one that is decidedly roguish. “Do _you_ like me, Bodhi?”

Bodhi’s face burns and he bites his lip against a smile. Among other things, he likes the way Cassian says his name.

He’s still working on an answer when Jyn comes in, Baze and Chirrut close behind her, and a bottle in her hand. “They were setting these out in the mess hall.”

Bodhi opens it and sniffs. Wine, of all things. The Rebellion can’t be picky about its intoxicants. “Thief,” he says to Jyn.

“Defector,” she says back, and kisses his cheek.

Cassian is watching. He starts to look away, but Bodhi offers him the bottle.

“Kalonia would have my head,” Cassian says.

Jyn makes a face at him. “Kalonia is a junior nurse, and has no business ordering anyone around.”

With an effort, Cassian lifts his hands. “Don’t let her hear you say that.”

“Are we going to do this,” Baze rumbles, “or should I go to the medal ceremony?”

“You wouldn’t want to be anywhere else,” Chirrut says.

“What is it we’re doing?” Cassian says. He tries to sit up. K-2 puts an extra cushion behind him.

“Celebrating,” Baze says, and he takes the bottle and drinks.

Jyn says, “Bodhi is going to…” The words escape her. They escape Bodhi, too.

“Dedicate himself,” Chirrut says, and yes, that sounds right.

“A holy man,” says Cassian, eyeing him. “Interesting.”

After what Bodhi and Jyn just did in a shuttle with the ramp open, it’s a wonder anything as simple as words and a look can make Bodhi flush, but that’s twice in short succession. He glances to Jyn. She’s untying her necklace. “Chirrut said you’d need this.”

Bodhi runs his thumb over the engraving on the crystal, broken off below “Trust in the”. He nods his thanks to Jyn, and turns to Chirrut. “What do I say?”

“Is it the words that matter, or the belief?” Chirrut says, and gestures Bodhi toward him. “Is the Force of others here?”

“Yes.” It’s in the bond between Bodhi and Jyn, and Jyn and Cassian, and Cassian and Bodhi, and between Chirrut and Baze, no matter how much Baze would deny it, and between Jyn and the crystal her mother gave her, and even, somehow, between Cassian and K-2.

“A right answer already,” Baze says. “He’s a prodigy."

Chirrut reaches out and Bodhi offers his arm. Chirrut follows it up. As Chirrut’s hand settles, callused and comforting on his head, Bodhi reflects on the similarities between _prodigy_ and _prodigal_.

He doesn’t speak the prayer. It resonates within him. The Force is with him, and he is one with the Force.


	10. Pilgrimage

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bodhi is twenty-seven and Jyn is twenty-four and he’s anxious and everyone can see it, and Force bless her, she wants to take his mind off it, but they’re in public. So she says to Baze and Chirrut, “Look, I don’t see why the duans have to be completed in order. Cassian and I agreed, Bodhi’s already achieved physical perfection.”
> 
> Bodhi’s face burns. For the hundredth time in the last hour, he fiddles with the hem of his chada. It isn’t quite the same hue as Chirrut’s. Heat-treated Jedhan clay is hard to come by and none of them wanted to go back, not yet. Maybe never. They made do with hydenock bark for the red dye.
> 
> “No one achieves physical perfect before age forty,” Baze says. At Jyn’s glare he adds, “I don’t make the rules.”
> 
> “He does,” Jyn says, and toes at Chirrut’s boot under the table. “You didn’t make him cut his hair. What’s the difference?”

Bodhi is twenty-seven and Jyn is twenty-four and he’s anxious and everyone can see it, and Force bless her, she wants to take his mind off it, but they’re in public. So she says to Baze and Chirrut, “Look, I don’t see why the duans have to be completed in order. Cassian and I agreed, Bodhi’s already achieved physical perfection.” 

Bodhi’s face burns. For the hundredth time in the last hour, he fiddles with the hem of his chada. It isn’t quite the same hue as Chirrut’s. Heat-treated Jedhan clay is hard to come by and none of them wanted to go back, not yet. Maybe never. They made do with hydenock bark for the red dye. 

“No one achieves physical perfect before age forty,” Baze says. At Jyn’s glare he adds, “I don’t make the rules.” 

“He does,” Jyn says, and toes at Chirrut’s boot under the table. “You didn’t make him cut his hair. What’s the difference?”

Chirrut angles his face toward her. “Advancement is determined not only by achieving the requirement, but by readiness for the reward. Do you think he’s ready for a lightbow?” 

His voice is not unkind, and neither is Jyn’s expression as she considers Bodh over her drink. He can best her, stick versus truncheon, two out of three times. There is no such thing as sparring with Jyn--she doesn’t know how to hold back, never conserves her energy, and every swing has her weight thrown into the followthrough. Bodhi’s gotten good at dodging, but they both land hits, bruise each other, kiss the bruises away later. 

He’s not ready for a lightbow. Maybe by the time he’s forty, he will make peace with the idea of taking someone’s life from a distance. For now he leaves it to Baze, and to Cassian, not that either of them are at peace with the idea, but they both consider themselves so thoroughly broken that it makes little difference. 

(Neither of them is broken. They’re not the same, but understanding one of them has helped Bodhi understand the other.) 

For the hundredth time Bodhi glances toward the bar, where Cassian sits angled toward the door. He meets Bodhi’s gaze for a fraction of a second, the corner of his mouth quirks up, and then he continues his casual scan of the room. Not yet. 

This is a small and quiet world. The farmers here have regular shifts, and habits after their shifts end. But maybe his expectations were wrong, at least about her. Does he know her anymore? Will he recognize her? It’s been twelve years. 

Cassian spent one of those years searching, and Bodhi spent nearly as long trying to decide how to respond to the information Cassian gave him. 

There’s no database of Jedhan survivors, and Bodhi hopes it stays that way for the time being. The Empire knows three members of the Rebellion’s best infiltration and retrieval team are Jedhan; they would not hesitate to complete their genocide. It’s a risk even to be here, although a small one. 

(“It’s safe enough,” Cassian said. “There is a point zero seven three five percent chance that the Empire will observe your meeting,” K-2 elaborated. “She’d want to know you’re alive,” Jyn added, and that was that.) 

Bodhi’s drink sits untouched, and he has just about talked himself into going back to the ship. He prays silently, to stop his running conjecture: maybe she doesn’t want to see him after all. 

She didn’t leave _him_. How many times has he told himself that? It hasn’t stopped him believing, all this time, that if he’d just said the right thing, she might have stayed. 

Cassian straightens, just enough that Bodhi notices. Jyn and Chirrut go quiet. The woman who steps into the tapcafe has her black hair coiled tightly in a bun. She goes to the bar. She was willowy when she left; less so now after so much physical work, and different food. Her clothes are simple, woven loosely of light local fibers, nothing like Jedhan layers. This place is temperate. 

After she orders, Cassian leans toward her and asks a question. He has his charming chatting-up face on, which Bodhi has grown to appreciate, and whether it’s that or a certain comfort with receiving attention here, she shows no sign of feeling threatened. Bodhi wonders how long ago she settled, how many years she has spent on a world untouched by the Empire. He envies her ease and freedom of breath. 

Cassian lifts his chin toward their booth, and she turns, and it’s been twelve years but he knows her strong profile and generous smile, and Bodhi stands. “Benas?”

“Bodhi,” his sister says. She looks him over as she steps toward him. He can see the confusion on her face at the contrast between his long hair and the Guardian robes that Baze taught him to make. He’s changed, and so too have the Guardians.

Bodhi opens his arms, and Benas steps into them, and  _ this _ is what a deep breath feels like. 

The past two years have given him more than he could have imagined--more family, more love, more  _ good _ than he believed he had any right to hope for. He is brimming with it now. 

For a long time they hold on to each other, and then he feels her shift to look beyond his shoulder. “That’s not,” she starts, and Bodhi nods. He grins, tastes his own tears. Benas leans away to look up at him. “I thought you were all dead. I didn’t go looking.” 

He would never have expected her to. “That’s all right,” he says, not because she’s asking for absolution, but for lack of anything better to tell her, and Benas rests her head on his shoulder again. 

“Aba and Ami?” she says a moment later, because she has to ask. Bodhi would, too; he’d have to be sure. He shakes his head, and Benas lets out a long sigh, letting go of them for good. 

She looks up at him once more, and then past him to where Baze and Chirrut are getting up and Jyn moves to join them. “Would you like to come by for tea and fringi?” she asks. 

Something leaps inside him. “Yes?” he says, and his sister takes his hand and leads him out to where the sun is setting, and Baze and Chirrut and Cassian and Jyn follow. 


End file.
